0x7B stopscreen while installing Vista

[Fuzzyblob]

I few days ago I got my copy of Vista, and immediately started installing it. All went well until the first reboot at which point I got a 0x7B stop screen error, which according to Microsoft means the boot drive's not accessible. Google has a lot of records of people having this problem, especially with my motherboard (an Asus P5W DH Deluxe). Fixes that have worked for other people include upgrading the BIOS to version 1707, removing all PCI cards, having at least two PCI cards in at one time, temporarily disabling their RAID setups, fiddling with BIOS settings (which I've done some of but not extensively I would imagine) and uninstalling Audigy sound cards. I've tried all of this, and none of it has worked. And I'm quite sure there are no viruses or drive corruptions because XP still runs fine and I've scanned for viruses. Does anyone have any more ideas as to how to fix this? Is anyone having similar problems?

Specs:
2 gigs of RAM
120 GB Maxtor Diamondmax 9 HD, old fashioned IDE connection
Asus P5W DH Deluxe MB, BIOS v.1707
PNY 8800 GTS video card
Audigy 2 ZS sound card
XP Pro

 

[Fuzzyblob]

Take a look a this article from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976/en-us

"During the Windows Vista installation process, any unused storage drivers are disabled. This behavior speeds up the operating system's startup process. When you change the boot drive to a driver that has been disabled, you must enable the new driver before you change the hardware configuration."

The article seems to have a perfect solution, except that it's systems with Vista already installed, not for when you're trying to install it. Can anyone think of a good way to do something similar but in XP?

 

[xtknight]

If you loaded it on there firstly (by installing) without issues, then you don't need any more drivers. I'm not sure why you're getting a 0x7B on reboot but I doubt it's because of storage drivers.

 

[FiLeZz]

If your mother board has more then one storage controller, as most now days do.

Move the boot drive to another controller, also take out any other drive that is not having vista installed on it, This will correct the issue.

 

[Smilin]

ok, yea a 7B is from mass storage drivers. Here are some things that can cause it:


1. Using a 3rd party IDE driver for your mobo that is XP specific. If you upgrade and vista tries to use the old driver you could have problems. To fix: clean install or uninstall the 3rd party before starting the upgrade. Follow the manufacturers instructions when uninstalling very carefully or you'll end up with a stop 7b on XP as well!

2. Using a 3rd party filter driver that plugs into the mass storage stack. This could include backup software, imaging software, some antivirus, things like that. Run the Vista ugprade advisor and it may spot these for you. Taking them out of the registry by hand is pretty easy if you absolutely know what you're doing. If you don't immediately know what I'm talking about, use the uninstall for these programs.

3. Mismatch between bios and the driver. Use the latest of both and you're usually ok.

Are you getting this issue during a clean install? I would be stunned to see a problem with an IDE driver during a clean install. Note: clean install doesn't require a format so you can still get to your old windows folder and data. The old OS wouldn't really boot though.

Another cause of a 7B is NTFS corruption making it impossible to read the driver. Use recovery console, your XP install or some other method to kick off a chkdsk.

 

[Fuzzyblob]

Well, I did my best to try all your guy's suggestions, but it still wasn't working, so I decided to do a clean install. It worked perfectly. Lesson learned: never expect results from the upgrade method. Thanks for all your help!