Thinkpads Forum

I've always used Acronis to keep an image of my drive. I screw around all the time, and when I hose up my Op System, I just blow my recent image back on to my ThinkPad. However, with this new T400 "downgraded" to XP, if I set up Acronis 9.0 (I bought Acronis 11 and it messed up networking) to recover my last image, it reboots, after the BIOS screen it tells me the "Starting Acronis loader...", then the screen goes blank. So....I hooked up the hard drive to a SATA to USB adapter. Another Vista computer installs the hard drive and USB just fine but it doesn't show up in My Computer. Disk Management see it fine, but wants to initialize it and mentions something about creating an MBR. I didn't do that.

Put the hard drive back in my T400 and tried to run two separate XP set up disks to get to a recovery console and run fixmbr. With both disks it starts to run setup, then a get a BSOS with a Stop: 0x0000007B.

Is my MBR screwed up? I can't do much of anything. I could reinstall everything, but would that fix my problem?

I think Advanced troubleshooting for "Stop 0x0000007B" errors in Windows XP article from M$ would be good to start with.

Thanks. Unfortunately that article mentions boot sector stuff. I'm runing a scan right now. Can't remember what I invited in the other day, but my anti-v blinked at it and I thought it was from an OK source so I told my anti-v to shut up.

If I just restore from the recovery partion, will that fix it or could it be this is at a deeper MBR/boot sector kind of level?

I've screwed up some boot sectors pretty bad with acronis. 7b means that the hard drive isn't mounting properly. If the recovery partition will boot, it means that the problem is probably centered in the main partition, and will be fixed when it is re-done. Have you tried installing XP on the main partition again?

I did some poking around on this. When I tried to boot from an XP disk, setup runs through all the hardware drivers, then tells me it's starting Windows. That's when I get the blue screen and the Stop: 7B error. I thnk it's just not finding a driver to run my hard drive.

I did rebuild from scratch. Saved all my data, complete restore. Just out of curiosity I tried to boot from an XP disk. Same result. When it says it's starting Windows, I get a 7B.

However, I can boot into a command prompt from a Vista install disk. And at the command prompt from the Vista install disk, I can get a dir on the c:\ drive. Looks like I could do what I want, though I didn't try.

So, I'm still thinking it's something about this hard drive (Hitachi HTS7220, meaning its a 160 Gig SATA drive) that XP doesn't know what to do with. Vista does.

Set the SATA to compatibility mode in BIOS.

Harryc wrote:Set the SATA to compatibility mode in BIOS.

I'll bet you're right. Since my XP works fine with AHCI installed, I'll get I can switch to compatiblility as a test, then go back to AHCI....right?

Yah, compatibility needs to be set for XP setup to recognize the disk. It can be switched back once SATA drivers have been installed.

Thanks so much for this thread and solution - been having trouble working out why an unattended install wouldn't work and this was the solution.