Gday

My silly husband clicked a URL in an email (it was from his sister, so he assumed it was safe). Three guesses it wasn't from his sister at all, and being the tightass he is when it comes to paying for anything remotely PC related. His antivirus I put on for him is MSE (free), and yes it told him he OS was being eaten, but did nothing to prevent it.

Anyways moving along, I put in his Vista Ultimate CD, to reinstall the OS. I have always in any computer had the boot priority as DVD/CD 1st, and 2nd, if the tower has two roms if not just the DVD/CD as the 1st boot device, then the hard drives.

Restarted the PC, it skipped straight past the boot up from the Rom and straight into what was left of his OS. The only thing that was left IE.



I had no command prompt to run as admin, so I tried finding his rom drive in hope that it may kick in from windows, it said please insert CD, so I ejected it and put it back in. It tried it's best to read it, but could not.

I built the tower a number of years now back for him, as I said he is a tightass when it comes to PC's and also a dumbass.

The motherboard I bought for him is an Asus M2N-MX SE, and because he didn't want to spend any money on the tower I ended up butchering another tower for parts.

Now here is where the problem begins, the M2N-MX SE has two IDE connections, I reused two of his IDE hard drives, and also an IDE DVD/CD rom. In order for me to get all three IDE devices to work I bought a RAID card that had IDE connections on it. This has worked perfectly as IDE since I built the tower for him.

As I jumped straight from Win2k to Vista (this is prior to Win7's release), it loaded Vista perfectly on my hard drive and also on my husbands.

Now I just happened to have an old IDE Seagate hard drive, it has Win2k on it. I know with PC's it is a process of elimination, to figure out which bit is creating the problem. So I removed his old IDE hard drive, checked the jumper settings, to make sure the rom and hard drive were not the same. Put in the Seagate hard drive, and it started booting into Win2k. Then I got a BSOD 0x0000007B (0xF741B84C,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000) INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

Keep in mind I had the RAID PCI card in the tower, and that was the drive I was trying to boot off. I removed the RAID IDE PCI card, plugged the Seagate straight into the the motherboard's IDE, rebooted into the BIOS to see if the drive was being recognised, it was. Restarted the PC, and same BSOD with the same error message, (with the Win2k disk in it said no hard drive could be found).

So then I moved onto other possibilities, a faulty stick of RAM, removed 1 stick, tried a restart same error message, pulled the other stick. Same thing, pulled them both up and swapped the positions, THIS TIME on the reboot, I got nothing, no nothing but a pretty black screen. Swapped the RAM back to it's original postion's rebooted and still just a black screen.

I have reset the CMOS, and am now out of ideas.

I am so totally over his tower, I am now thinking of doing a total rebuild for him, unless you guys can give me some suggestions as to what is going on.

Originally Posted by usasma

I'm not 100% sure of what you've done - but it sounds like you're trying to boot with things that weren't orginally intended to boot this system (either different OS's or different hard drives). FYI - Win2K won't successfully boot when place in another system. The old OS just isn't flexible enough to adjust to the new/different hardware - and if it's the hard drive controller that's involved, you can get a STOP 0x7B from it.

And for the Vista installation, Windows may not put the boot stuff on the same drive as you install Windows on - so it'll also give a STOP 0x7B error.

I would suggest that the easiest thing would be:

Backup any data (and scan with a working antivirus on another system)
Wipe the hard drives with a free wiping tool such as DBAN or KillDisk
Connect one hard drive and one CD/DVD (leave the RAID card out for now.
Install Vista on the single hard drive.

Then install the RAID card and it's drivers - then you can add another hard drive.

Connect one hard drive and one CD/DVD (leave the RAID card out for now.
Install Vista on the single hard drive.

I have tried the above connecting the working hard drive directly to the motherboard, however the BIOS is just not recognizing it .

Secondly how do I wipe the hard drive, when the only other PC I have available for use is a laptop?. All of my neighbours are elderly and do not have a PC, I do not know of anyone close by that has I am guessing a desktop that I could hook the hard drive up to.

Originally Posted by usasma

To wipe the hard drive, you use a bootable disk.
Google for DBAN or KillDisk - both are free and you can boot from them.

But the system will have to recognize the hard drive first - before you'll be able to wipe it.
I'd suggest checking to see if the hard drive is recognized on the channel that you're using for the CD/DVD. That'll tell you if it's the hard drive or if it's the motherboard.

I am now suspecting his motherboard may have died, I had tried swapping the ROM for the hard drive, and ended up looking at not even a BSOD, but just a black screen. His use of his PC, does not warrant a separate GPU, he uses the onboard graphics.

Now I do have an old GPU I can try on his mobo, problem is it's under the house, and he needs to drag the tower out for me.

Originally Posted by Yard Dog

Did you get any beep code ?

From memory it was, then it may have of stopped, I honestly cannot remember when. I did remove 1 stick of RAM, tried booting it, black screen, put it back in swapped out the other stick, still a black screen.

I am so over trying to figure this out at the moment