SOLVED: Stop 0x7b on SATA install Win2k

Every fourth or fifth machine I put together has some kind of install
gremlin. I thought this time I'd play safe and choose the same mobo as
last time, an el-cheapo Asus M2V which for the money I think is a nice
solid low-end mobo with a generous number of memory slots (4) and PCI
slots (4). This time I put an AMD 4000 X 2 in instead of the previous
3800 X 2 simply because the vendor didn't have any 3800's at the time,
and since 320G WD SATA was only a few dollars more than 250G
(Samsung), that was the other change.

I tend to give the hardware a bit of a burnin first by booting Win98
to the command prompt from a USB stick and then FDISKing and
formatting the drive, rather than rushing in. This smokes out any
obvious early problems. All went well however until I then booted from
the Win2K CD and went to install. As soon as the O/S went into
protected mode it faulted with stopcode 0x7b unreachable boot device.

Tried changing SATA port - no difference. Even though I knew it wasn't
necessary, I even loaded the VIA 8237 RAID driver from floppy by
pressing F6 during install. This also didn't help. I had almost
resigned myself to adding a PATA drive and putting the OS on that when
I thought, hmm, let's change the SATA cable. And that fixed it. Now
whether this is just an out-of-spec cable putting reflections on the
line or actually it has a bad connection, I don't know. But weird that
the drive would even surface scan flawlessly from DOS. Oddly, Linux
(Ubuntu Feisty) would also install OK onto the drive, though it did
bitch a bit about fsck not having been run for some silly time period
- but it did install fine. This led me to trust the hardware. Lesson
learned. Just thought I'd share this with you as obviously it's such
an easy thing to change.

Same here. Swapped the CompUSA purchased IDE cable for a Shop-Intel.com IDE
cable and all my worries are past me.

Amazing when you think about it. BIOS was detecting all the drives, however,
Windows would not load, nor install, with the faulty cable. Change cables
and BIOS still detects all the drives and know Windows will install and boot
the OS.

Had it not been for your post, I probably would have spent a fortune to get
my system running without ever knowing exactly what was the real problem.

Thank you for the post!!!!!!!!!!

<> wrote in message
news: oups.com...
> Every fourth or fifth machine I put together has some kind of install
> gremlin. I thought this time I'd play safe and choose the same mobo as
> last time, an el-cheapo Asus M2V which for the money I think is a nice
> solid low-end mobo with a generous number of memory slots (4) and PCI
> slots (4). This time I put an AMD 4000 X 2 in instead of the previous
> 3800 X 2 simply because the vendor didn't have any 3800's at the time,
> and since 320G WD SATA was only a few dollars more than 250G
> (Samsung), that was the other change.
>
> I tend to give the hardware a bit of a burnin first by booting Win98
> to the command prompt from a USB stick and then FDISKing and
> formatting the drive, rather than rushing in. This smokes out any
> obvious early problems. All went well however until I then booted from
> the Win2K CD and went to install. As soon as the O/S went into
> protected mode it faulted with stopcode 0x7b unreachable boot device.
>
> Tried changing SATA port - no difference. Even though I knew it wasn't
> necessary, I even loaded the VIA 8237 RAID driver from floppy by
> pressing F6 during install. This also didn't help. I had almost
> resigned myself to adding a PATA drive and putting the OS on that when
> I thought, hmm, let's change the SATA cable. And that fixed it. Now
> whether this is just an out-of-spec cable putting reflections on the
> line or actually it has a bad connection, I don't know. But weird that
> the drive would even surface scan flawlessly from DOS. Oddly, Linux
> (Ubuntu Feisty) would also install OK onto the drive, though it did
> bitch a bit about fsck not having been run for some silly time period
> - but it did install fine. This led me to trust the hardware. Lesson
> learned. Just thought I'd share this with you as obviously it's such
> an easy thing to change.
>