Vista - Driver and hard drive problem

A couple of days ago I took a SATA hard drive from another computer and
installed it on this computer. I hot plugged it in and everything went
well. Assigned G & L and showed up in Computer and was viewable in
explorer normally.
I decided I wanted to keep my hard drives sequentially lettered, so I
changed L to the next available letter, took H-K and moved them down 1
letter and changed the temp letter to H (all in Disk Management). Still
everything showed up okay in Computer, Disk Management and Device Manager.
Now for the problem.
Next reboot the computer said it had to install new drivers. I let each of
the two iterations find the appropriate driver, after which it had to
reboot. After the reboot the drive failed to show up in Computer or Disk
Management, it showed up as other devices in Device Manager. The next
reboot asked for drivers again, but this time both iterations failed to find
drivers. The solution offered was to download KB940199 which I did and it
would not install. I checked to see installed updates and see I installed
it on 1/1/2008. Next reboot asked for the drivers again and this time I
clicked not to offer the New Hardware Wizard again for this device for both
iterations (still just one drive). Next reboot failed on hardware failure
0x0000007b. I booted with last known good, successfully, but now asks for
drivers again.
Short story, now I either have to select ask again and go thru this each
time the machine boots since every time I select Don't Ask the hardware
crash occurs.
It makes no difference whether the drive is connected or not. With it
connected I get the drive shown in Other Devices with the driver not
installed. If I change to another SATA HD, It still lists the original hard
drive number, not the new one.

Go back to a restore point before you added everything.

When you added the new SATA drive, did you add it to a controller that you
hadn't used before?

--
Charlie.
http://msmvps.com/blogs/xperts64
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/profile/charlie.russel


"John Barnes" <jbarnes@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:%23JhiV11oIHA.1240@xxxxxx

Also, if he is running an NVidia based board, some MS drivers from Windows
Update might have got into his system causing the problem.
MS Nvidia drivers are always faulty.
He should install NVidia official drivers if, then again, his mobo is NVidia
chipset based.
Carlos

"Charlie Russel - MVP" wrote:

Hi, John.

Skipping all the rest to get to the heart of the matter...
Stop 0x7B is the classic symptom of an Incompatible Boot Device. Note the
word "Boot". That means you are trying to boot from a drive for which the
proper drivers are not in place. No amount of adding drivers to Windows or
Vista will help; you can't even load Windows to access Device Manager.
There are only two ways to fix this.

Either get the proper drivers for the boot device onto a floppy, then boot
from the CD/DVD and press F6 to install those drivers.

Or set your BIOS to boot from a HD for which drivers have been installed -
and on which the proper boot sector and boot-up files (NTLDR, etc., or
bootmgr, etc.) are in place.

So far as I can see, you haven't said whether you are using WinXP x64 or
Vista x64. There are some differences, but the basic problem is the same:
the BIOS can't see your boot device because either (1) it is looking at the
wrong device (IDE instead of SATA, for example), or (2) it is looking at the
right place but it doesn't yet have the proper drivers to read that device.

I first saw this problem way back in Win2K when my boot device was on SCSI.
Now we see the same problem with SATA and RAID controllers. This is usually
not a problem with using those "exotic" drives as data drives; it's only
when we try to boot from such a drive that the problem appears - and we get
the STOP 0x7B.

And I still don't understand why the BIOS, Boot.ini, BCD and Device
Management can't always agree on which device is Disk 0. :^{

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail 2008 in Vista Ultimate x64 SP1)

"John Barnes" <jbarnes@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:#JhiV11oIHA.1240@xxxxxx