BSOD 0x0000007B

[stduc]

I have an HP Media Centre PC m7000 with 2GB of RAM and 2 Western Digital WD2500JS SATA drives (250GB).

This is my neighbours PC and it has fallen to me to sort it out. he reports that it started running slow so he decided to reformat it and start again using the recovery disk. Unfortunately it blue screened before it completed the formatting. I tried and it blue screened before the recovery CD loaded Windows.

I have so far, cleaned it (it was full of dust bunnies), run Memtest 86 with no issues and run Sprinrite which stuck at 66%.

I am using my full Windows XP Pro CD (merely with a view to formatting the drives only and then returning the PC) However it bluescreens with
0x0000007B (0xF78D2524,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)
I have even removed the power and cables from both drives and it still bluescreens when I would expect it to complain that no hard drives were found.

I am now a bit non plussed as to where to go from here.

Ideas, advice please.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]

 

[Davetoo]

Did none of these 1480 sites help at all?

http://www.google.com/search?source...(0xF78D2524,0xC0000034,0x00000000,0x00000000)

I'm Certifiable, not cert-ified.
It just means my answers are from experience, not a book.

There are no more PDC's! There are DC's with FSMO roles!

 

[stduc]

Well I didn't check all 1480, but I did read quite a few. None mentioned the HP media that I noticed (I added HP Media to my search string and got 1 hit I think)

Anyway I was hoping for sensible suggestions of things I may have missed. But no matter, I am happy to say - all sorted. Lessons learned from this.

1. ASSUME "neighbour" has been fiddling with the BIOS (I assumed they would not be so stupid!)
2. Fix BIOS setting and when fixed, apply setup password and DO NOT give it to them.

BTW I finally noticed that they had changed the drive controller settings to AHCI from IDE!

Sorry I panicked & posted here before I should have.

I am amazed that it got as far as it did with Spinrite with those BIOS settings! Sprinrite reports 100% clean now. I have not tried the recovery CD yet though. But I have re-formatted the drive as XP Setup reported a small partition followed by a large unallocated space. So I removed the partition, created a new one, formatted it and hit the power button.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]

 

[stduc]

The end of the saga. (As the above failed). I'm posting this in case it helps someone else save a lot of time. I'm not going to go into details though.

Suffice it to say that the HDD had failed. Although both Spinrite and the Western Digital diagnostics passed it as OK.
The correct BIOS setting was RAID!
There is a 'secret' menu on the HP recovery CD. At the first prompt after booting from the CD hold down the control key and press the backspace key!!!!!!!!! YOU NEED THIS if starting from a brand new HDD!!!!!!
With a new drive the recovery process completed after 45 minutes. With the original drive it failed around the 6 hour mark! It never got to the final stage of driver and software installation which took another couple of hours.

Needless to say I have lost a bit of my faith in Spinrite and I am not impressed by Western Digitals diagnostics either.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]

 

[G0AOZ]

Glad you sorted it Stduc. You said, "Suffice it to say that the HDD had failed", but you'd mentioned earlier that Spinrite had stuck at 66%. Whilst I'm not defending Gibson's software, do you not think the fact that it "stuck" is significant?

ROGER - G0AOZ.

 

[stduc]

I do - which is why I tried WD's diagnostics. That software said - problems found and fixed. Lying toe rag of a piece of software that turned out to be - LOL. The real problem was the drive didn't have the decency to die properly. I emailed GRC who suggested that the drive was causing the BIOS to not return the data at the fail point. Thus Spinrite got 'stuck' and WD's software just trundled on! Oh well - you live & learn.

[navy]When I married "Miss Right" I didn't realise her first name was 'always'. LOL[/navy]