BSOD During Windows XP or Vista Setup

UPSKingpin

Alright, here's the story so far. Got this PC (Acer Aspire M5640) for super cheap, but it came with Vista. I formatted the drive and installed XP instead, got drivers, ran everything fine for almost a year now.

I recently got a new 500GB SATA hard drive and decided I wanted to back up all my data and start clean with both drives. I got everything backed up, hooked up the new drive, then booted with my Windows XP disc. After all the preloading, right after "Setup is starting Windows", I get a stop error: 0x0000007b INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

My first thought was that my new drive was bad. I removed it and tried running XP setup with only my old drive in the system. Same result. I then tried all the following with the same stop error after each one:

old drive only
new drive only
no drive at all
different SATA data cables
different SATA ports
ran chkdsk

I've gone through the BIOS a dozen times, enabling and disabling any features having anything to do with IDE, SATA or IRQ with the same error. Also set BIOS to failsafe defaults.

After giving up, I decided to try putting Vista back on the system. Again, got the same stop error. Then tried everything above once again, this time with Vista. Same results.

Spent over five hours trying to figure it out, googling and forum searching, and couldn't find a fix. Finally, I booted with Windows 7, formatted my drive and installed, and everything went smoothly. I'm now running Windows 7 and everything works, including my new drive. I am fairly satisfied with the OS in general, but am considering switching back to XP until I can get more RAM. Windows 7 is eating 1/3 of my RAM when idle with nothing in the background and I find this to be unacceptable.

Just to be sure it wasn't an issue with my old installation, I tried XP and Vista setups once again and got the same stop error. I don't have a floppy drive, so I can't load a driver for either drive (which seems unnecessary anyway).

I'm not sure if I want to return to XP for awhile or stick with Windows 7, but I'd still like to find out what's causing this stop error. Does anyone have any recommendations on what I can do to fix or pinpoint this problem?

Sidenote: I installed Recovery Console onto my hard drive awhile back and, upon running it, I get the same stop error.

Specs:
Pentium Dual Core E2160 1.8 GHz
3GB DDR2 RAM
320GB Western Digital HDD
500GB Samsung Spinpoint HDD
Asus GeForce EN9600GSO 384MB

Snarkasm

UPSKingpin wrote:

Windows 7 is eating 1/3 of my RAM when idle with nothing in the background and I find this to be unacceptable.

What did you buy the RAM for if you didn't want it to be used?

Windows will release the RAM if a program requests it. Stop being goofy, or go pick up 4 gigs for $30. It's absolutely ridiculous to return to a two-generation old OS because the new one uses your hardware better AND you can ameliorate whatever perceived system degradation you think that creates by spending a pittance.

UPSKingpin

Snarkasm wrote:

What did you buy the RAM for if you didn't want it to be used?

Windows will release the RAM if a program requests it. Stop being goofy, or go pick up 4 gigs for $30. It's absolutely ridiculous to return to a two-generation old OS because the new one uses your hardware better AND you can ameliorate whatever perceived system degradation you think that creates by spending a pittance.

Well, I was running Crysis on medium-high settings in XP, now I can't run higher than low-medium without ridiculously low framerate. Only thing that changed was the OS. I understand that Win7 uses my RAM much better, but I also notice that my framerate in games is suffering regardless. And I've disabled multiple services and demanding display settings to compensate with very little change. I never said it was something unbearable, I just get less performance, end of story.

And $30 for RAM is hardly an acceptable expenditure when I'm struggling to find work and keep myself from starving. Like I said, if I do choose to switch back to XP, it would only be until I can get more RAM.

Snarkasm

I was feeling cranky, apparently. I apologize - sincerely.

If the drive acts up when scanning it for errors, it's likely to be a bad drive that 7's installer can work around. Can you check it with DFT and/or SeaTools to try and replicate the issue?

Thrax

Windows 7 is eating 1/3 of my RAM when idle with nothing in the background and I find this to be unacceptable.

Windows 7 manages RAM differently from Windows XP. It pre-loads/caches applications into the background for faster start times, but if you run a memory-intensive app, it flushes this cache and performs identically to XP.

mirage

If you stop and disable "Windows Search" and "Superfetch" services in Windows 7, the OS will use a little less memory and pretty much act like Windows XP. These services run in the background to enhance the user experience but sometimes interfere with the foreground tasks and use memory. They have disk intensive operations that are supposed to happen when the computer is idle but there are times when the responsiveness of the system suffers. I always disable them.

You can also disable Windows Defender if you are using a complete antivirus solution. The newly released Microsoft Security Essential disables it by default. Finally, I disable automatic background disk defragmentation too. I do it manually every couple of weeks/months.

With the few changes above, I feel that the OS is more responsive and leaner. You can try these and it is always possible to reverse them if you do not like.

UPSKingpin

mirage wrote:

If you stop and disable "Windows Search" and "Superfetch" services in Windows 7, the OS will use a little less memory and pretty much act like Windows XP.

Already did it It did help a lot, but I'm still having issues.


Once again, I already understand how the use of RAM has been optimized in Windows 7, but no matter how it's supposed to perform, my memory usage is maxing out in a couple games and it NEVER did that in XP. Nothing is running in the background and I've got the services above turned off. My CPU usage is average and my memory usage is off the chart.

But we're getting sidetracked with the performance issue when I'm more than likely sticking with Windows 7 anyway. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to remedy my stop error problem?

UPSKingpin

Snarkasm wrote:

I was feeling cranky, apparently. I apologize - sincerely.

If the drive acts up when scanning it for errors, it's likely to be a bad drive that 7's installer can work around. Can you check it with DFT and/or SeaTools to try and replicate the issue?

No problem, man

Yeah, I'll give them both a shot here in a bit and let you know what happens.

UPSKingpin

Alright, I ran all SeaTools tests and everything is good.

Booted up with DFT and it's only detecting my 500GB Samsung, not my 320GB WD system drive. Obviously, I just booted into Windows on the drive it didn't detect, so any suggestions on how I should proceed from here?

UPSLynx

If you need a floppy drive to attempt loading drivers, I can hook it up, but it seems it may be unnecessary.

what about an update to mobo bios is in store? or has that been done? (apologies if I missed it)

..I'm not very good with boot sector issues.

UPSKingpin

UPSLynx wrote:

If you need a floppy drive to attempt loading drivers, I can hook it up, but it seems it may be unnecessary.

what about an update to mobo bios is in store? or has that been done? (apologies if I missed it)

..I'm not very good with boot sector issues.

I haven't updated BIOS because the only update I can find is on the Acer site. Problem is, there are three versions because there were three variations of my model of Aspire. Wouldn't be a problem because I could check what version my BIOS is, but the downloads themselves have NO information on model or version whatsoever. So I'd rather not mess with it at all and risk a complete failure.

This is all turning into a huge headache and everything is telling me not to worry about it, since Windows 7 works. But the tech in me really wants to find out what the problem is and how to fix it.

danball1976

As I was reading elsewhere online when AHCI is enabled when previously set as IDE, XP will give that 0x0000007b INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. Also, when AHCI is enabled and you install XP, you need to press F6 to install additional drivers. XP does not come with a AHCI generic driver, and you'll get that same stop error.

Vista does, but if you go IDE to AHCI on an existing install, you have to do a registry edit to force it to load the generic AHCI driver before enabling AHCI in the BIOS, otherwise you'll get a BSOD if you don't do a registry edit.

I believe Windows 7 doesn't require these steps (need to do more research)

UPSKingpin

danball1976 wrote:

As I was reading elsewhere online when AHCI is enabled when previously set as IDE, XP will give that 0x0000007b INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE error. Also, when AHCI is enabled and you install XP, you need to press F6 to install additional drivers. XP does not come with a AHCI generic driver, and you'll get that same stop error.

Vista does, but if you go IDE to AHCI on an existing install, you have to do a registry edit to force it to load the generic AHCI driver before enabling AHCI in the BIOS, otherwise you'll get a BSOD if you don't do a registry edit.

I believe Windows 7 doesn't require these steps (need to do more research)

Awesome information, thanks. I saw a suggestion on a forum that I should switch from AHCI to IDE or vice versa in BIOS, but sadly I have no IDE/AHCI options in my BIOS I might borrow a floppy from my man UPSLynx and load a driver, simply to see if I can get into XP setup. I won't be installing, but I'm curious.