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?

 

[MowTin]

FuzzyBlob,

I had a similar problem installing onto my Asus A8N-E.

1st vista could not see on of my drives. I have 2 Sata drives and on setup it either did not see the drive or listed it as unformatted. If I tried to format it gave an error.

Because of this I made the very big error of booting to xp and installing from xp onto a partition of my other drive. Big mistake. On reboot I got the stopscreen you're getting. Worst yet now I could not get back into XP.

Finally, I download gparted and resized partitions then created a partition for vista on the first drive I tried before. That worked.

Did you install vista from xp? The problem with that is xp may see your drive but when you reboot with vista it may not see the drive and crash.

1. check if there are vista drivers for your chipset. If it all comes bundled in an install exe you can extract the files you need using -x option or something. When in vista setup point to the vista sata drivers.

2. make sure there are no errors on your hard drive. I think vista is more sensitive to disk errors than xp.

Vista should really do a better job with sata drives. I don't know why tiny little programs that can fit on a floppy can do the job but vista cannot.

 

[pkellmey]

This exact same thing is happening even with people not on Vista, but who are using ASUS boards with NVidia Network Controllers and Maxtor drives. Change the harddisk (different manufacturer) and the error might go away. Check the ASUS forums and you might see several people with the same issue - there was for my m/b.

 

[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!