True to my user name, I have killed my wife's notebook

Cross posted from a similar site in hopes of casting a wider net . . .

So I started out with a perfectly good, brand new Inspiron 1720 with Vista Home Premium pre-installed, which my wife and I purchased for her to use as her primary computer. It worked fine. Except that it was Vista, and like seemingly 99% of the world my wife grew to dislike Vista, so we did the research and decided it would be a good idea to dual boot with XP Home, which the idea being that we would use exclusively XP until it someday became advisable or necessary to give Vista another chance.

I purchased an XP Home with SP2 DVD and attempted to dual boot. Then the roadblocks started. Can't detect the disk drives. So I downloaded drivers, bought a USB floppy drive and did the F6 thing. Not enough partitions to install XP because it was a Dell with Media Direct. So I deleted Media Direct and its partitions and re-installed XP. And so on. And then it finally happened -- XP at last completed the install process, the Windows XP splash screen appeared . . . and for the briefest moment a BSOD flashed and then the system rebooted. The BSOD was so quick, it took me about 15 tries of staring right where the code appears just to make out the last two characters: 7B.

So with XP utterly unusable, I popped in the Vista DVD to repair the Vista bootloader. It worked fine. I used Easy BCD and tried to set up a dual boot. Got the dual boot menu just fine, but if I selected XP . . . 7B.

Hours turned into nights. No cure for the 7B error. Then, one night, other errors started to occur within Vista. Before long Vista was unusable as well. It couldn't last 5 minutes after startup before a BSOD appeared, with errors like 24, 50, and something involving a C. I can't even remember them all at this point.

So now I had an XP installation that won't boot, and a Vista installation that I had shepherded from working just fine to unusable. I tried to repair Vista, but to no avail. I ran CHKDSK, which told me the disk was just fine.

At the end of my rope, with no functioning OS at all, I decided to try formatting the entire drive and installing only XP. It was a drastic step that I had been trying to avoid, but that time had come.

So tonight I did that. Everything worked fine. I formatted the entire drive as a new partition and installed XP. It completed the installation process and rebooted. The XP splash screen appeared . . . and then the 7B BSOD returned for an instant and then the system rebooted. Again and again and again. Even with a completely formatted hard drive with only XP, I could not get the 7B error to go away.

So now I come before you seeking help. I have taken my wife's computer from a perfectly-functioning Vista system to a coaster with an unbootable XP Home installation.

Any theories on what I need to do to get it working again? Thanks in advance for your help. If there is information you need that I haven't included, please let me know and I'll be glad to supply.
 
Hello and welcome to NeoSmart Technologies.

If I had to hazard a guess (and I do, because I don't have enough info to do otherwise... :wink:), I'd say the drivers you grabbed to make XP recognize your hard drive controllers aren't good. Either they're too old, they're not for the same exact model that you have, or they're damaged...

It's either that or that your Windows XP CD/DVD is damaged.

Solution:
Get more info. Press F8 before the Windows XP splash screen appears, and from the menu that you get, pick "Do not restart on system failure"

That will make it actually show the blue screen instead of rebooting. Copy down the code, post it here, and we'll figure this thing out.
 
Thanks! Never knew you could F8 to get it to stop. That would have helped before . . .

Here is the code I'm seeing:

*** STOP: 0x0000007B (0xBACCB524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
 
Yep, as I had originally surmised: the drivers you got aren't working right, and Windows XP cannot see the drive.

What's the exact model of your motherboard?
 
How do I find the exact model of the motherboard?

Addendum:

Here's what I've been able to learn about my system configuration. Does any of this help?

QuantityParts #Part Description
shad.gif
1MU697PROCESSOR..., T7250, 2.0, 2MB, CMER, M01DF266ASSEMBLY..., ADAPTER..., ALTERNATING CURRENT..., 90W, MOBILE 2007..., LEAD FREE..., LITEON...001323INFORMATION..., NO ITEM1DF771CORD..., POWER..., 125, 1M, C7, 2P, DUAL..., UNITED STATES...1DT549GUIDE..., OWNER..., 1720, ENGLAND/ENGLISH...1RT720PLACEMAT..., GETTING STARTED..., 1720/1721, DAO/EMEA1YK181GUIDE..., PRODUCT..., INFORMATION..., CLIENT..., DAO/BCC1UW739KEYBOARD..., 101, UNITED STATES..., ENGLAND/ENGLISH..., SINGLE POINTING..., ADRT1MU428ASSEMBLY..., DVD+/-RW..., 8X, IDE (INTEGRATED DRIVE ELECTRONICS) ..., CGSYD, SNO1DY656ASSEMBLY..., CABLE..., PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD..., LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY..., GYGBT1TM116LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY..., 17, Wide Ultra Extended Graphics Array..., VIDEO ELEC. STDS. ASSOC...., TLF, SHARP...1MX846CARD (CIRCUIT)..., WIRELESS..., MINICARD..., DW1505, B11PN182KIT..., SOFTWARE..., WORKS..., 8.5, ENGLAND/ENGLISH...1CW725CARD (CIRCUIT)..., WIRELESS..., INTERNAL..., BLUETOOTH..., 355, VSTA1XR812HARD DRIVE..., 250GB, Serial ATA..., 9.5, 5.4K, W1251NR218BATTERY..., PRIMARY..., 56WHR, 6C, LITHIUM..., SIMPLO42864DSCREW..., M3X3, K SCREW HEAD..., MICROSOFT..., BLACK OXIDE...1UK437ASSEMBLY..., BASE (ASSEMBLY OR GROUP)..., NOTEBOOK..., DISCRETE..., 17201XK231ASSEMBLY..., CONNECTOR..., BOARD TO BOARD..., 22P, GYGBT1DY687BEZEL..., PLASTIC..., LIQUID CRYSTAL DISPLAY..., NO-CAMERA..., BLACK, G/Y1UW165ASSEMBLY..., MICROPHONE..., INTEGRATED..., NOTEBOOK..., LITEON, M081HX425KIT..., SOFTWARE..., OVERPACK..., VHP32, A01, DIGITAL VIDEO DISK DRIVE..., ENGLAND/ENGLISH...2Y9530DUAL IN-LINE MEMORY MODULE..., 1GB, 667, 128X64, 8K, 2001DY445CARD (CIRCUIT)..., GRAPHICS..., NVIDIA..., G84, 256MB, #21YX525KIT..., SOFTWARE..., DELL MEDIA DIRECT..., 3.3, COMPACT DISK DRIVE..., GILLIGAN
 
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Adding on to provide more information:

Here is the driver that I loaded via F6. I am at a loss for how to find another driver that will enable XP to see the drives. Please help!

Thank you!
 
Well, it's not exactly easy to go through that list you posted above...

The last time I had this problem w/ a Dell, I downloaded the driver for my SATA controller (the one you DL'd from Dell) from intel.com
 
Yeah, I apologize for that unwieldy list. The formatting looked better when I copied it from the Dell site than it did when I pasted it here.

I found some updated drivers from intel.com and am attempting to re-install with them now. I'll report back with the results.
 
We have a mutual problem

Hey, definatly have the same problem

I've been doing some research, and as our friend here told us, it is definatly a problem with the controller... In this case, it's my girlfriend's computer, she asked me to get rid of Vista since she couldn't run her Autocad 2006 there, since it's the one she likes... So i told her i would install Windows XP...

Her computer it's a brand new Dell Vostro 1700, which has almost the same components as the new Inspiron computers

Instead of using a flopppy disk (since that's pretty old and laptops don't have floppy anymore), I studied how to load the drivers with the Windows setup.

I got the error at first with my old Windows XP Professional setup CD which doesn't have any service packs. I copied that cd on my hard drive and found out how to upgrade the Installation with a downloaded Service Pack 2 Setup... So it worked perfectly. After that, I did some research to learn how to slip the SATA drives into that setup since windows couldn't detect any hard drives, and it worked perfectly too (I used the same drivers you found on that DELL site).

So now my setup doesn't cause any errors at the begining and I loads the SATA drivers with allows me to see the hard drive and install Windows XP.


After Windows XP is installed, I get the same error again on the Windows Logo (Exact same error code you got)

So my best guess is... The driver I sliped into the Windows Setup (which is the same driver you used with your floppy drive) works just fine, since it allows windows to detect the hard drive and perform the whole instalation, including all the restarts it does before it's completed. But at the end of the instalation, Windows installs another SATA driver that causes some conflict with the original one. (Correct me if I'm wrong)

I think I found a possible way to fix this, except that, I don't know how to modify Windows Registry on the recovery consol, and it's the only way i can modify it since Windows won't start in either normal or safe mode, won't even start at command prompt... only the recovery console found in the Windows CD.



On this site I found a registry file that should fix all the drivers
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314082

And I'm thinking... If i replace "atapi" for "iastore" on these lines

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\primary_ide_channel]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="atapi"

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase\secondary_ide_channel]
"ClassGUID"="{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}"
"Service"="atapi"

I might be able to load the right SATA controller

Note that the driver's file name is iastore.sys


Please correct me if I'm wrong, and if you think my solution could work, could you please tell me how to load a registry file on the restore console?

Addendum:

Hey, I found a solution

Turn on your computer, and press F2 to get in the BIOS setup

On the On Board Devices section, disable the Flash Cache Module and then, on SATA Operation inside On Board Devices, Switch it from AHCI to ATA

You should be able to enter windows normally now


Now does anyone know if there's any way to make AHCI work?
 
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Must have been the other thread where i said i turned my SATA drives from ACHI to ATa and it works jsut fine.

But really the only thing i can think of is to turn it back on after you install XP. But after runing in ACHI for 3 years and jsut recently turning it off. I dont see the difference or benefit from having it on. I have left my PC in ATA mode for the past few months and i have not lost a single bit of speed.
 
Well, my computer installe the ATA drivers instead of the AHCI Drivers so when I activate AHCI I get the blue screen again, any suggestions?
 
Like I said in my previous post, you need to install the full chipset drivers first, then enable AHCI.
 
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