Need some assistance please, Win2K 0x0000007b stop error.

[JoLLyRoGer]

My brother who lives half way across the country called me last night after hosing his computer. Since I built it for him I am very familiar with it.

This is the machine.

Athlon C @ 1200
ABIT A7M (VIA)
Maxtor Diamond Max 30
Award BIOS
Toshiba DVD
TDK VeloCD
Sony 1.44
SB LIve 5.1
GF2 MX
256MB PC2100DDR (Kingston)
Win2000

Here is the scenario. The 'puter was steaming right along until he installed a burned copy of some game. The game wanted to install a ActiveX update so he let it. After rebooting the machine displays the blue screen of death with stop error 0x0000007b right after the 1st status bar at the bottom of the screen indicated Windows is ready to start.

Preliminary research has shown that the error code indicates an inaccessable boot device. This can be caused by BIOS changes in the Advanced Power Management settings or if I was to take the HD out of that computer and slap it in a computer with a different hardware configuration.

The next two paragraphs are my own speculation, this is certainly not the gospel:
I assume changes in values that are set in the regestry is the cause of the stop error in this case. From what I've read, the BIOS assigns values to each hardware device when the computer boots up. These alpha-numeric values are codes that indicate the motherboard chipset as well as the hardware manufacturer. It is my belief that Windows uses this information upon install to determine how to perform hardware input/output operations.

Whatever it was that my brother installed changed some critical values in the registry resulting in a checksum error whenever Windows tries to load. In lamens terms, Windows doesn't know how to talk to the hardware. Again this is strictly my speculation based on what I've read HERE, HERE, and HERE.

This is what I've done to troubleshoot so far.
1. Had brother try to boot into safe mode.
2. Had brother try to boot into debugger mode.
3. Had brother try to boot into command prompt.
4. Had brother load BIOS defaults and try to boot into any mode.
5. Had brother jumper CMOS to reset and back, load BIOS defaults and try to boot.

All attempts were unsuccessful. Blue Screen every time.

He lost the emergency recovery disk that I created for him.

I forgot to have him try booting from the CD-ROM, but I called him and when he gets home we're going to try that. Hopefully that will let us in and he can remove whatever it was he installed. I'm not even sure if that will fix things.

Assuming that booting from the CD does NOT fix things, what else can I try?
BTW, primary partition is NTFS, so a Win98 boot disk isn't going to work.

Thanks in Advance.
JR..

 

[Saltin]

Generally, when software burns your OS like this, the best bet is to boot to the Last known good configuration and immediately un-install the offender. The last known good configuration is a copy of the registry that Windows knows is good.

Have you tried that?

 

[JoLLyRoGer]

I instructed my brother to do that (guess I for got to mention that in my trouble shooting) and it listed profile 1 as the only option which I thought was weird. I figured it would list original configuration as an option.

At any rate we tried it with profile 1 and it still would not boot.

 

[underpaid]

Reinstall 2k over itself and see what you get, should work.

 

[Geekbabe]

you could try booting from the cd and selecting the install option, it'll find the existing install of the OS and offer to repair it for you,that's saved me a time or two.


Btw,he was installing a "burned copy" of a game ? possible that a virus infected the boot sector