Help with hard drive issue when downgrading from Vista to XP

Hello all,

So my story begins when the hard drive of my Sony VAIO NS keeled over and completely died one day soon after the one-year warranty expired. I researched computer shops to get it replaced and fixed but their asking prices were exorbitant! I then opted to replace the hard drive myself, which turned out easy enough: bought a new, fresh laptop SATA hard drive and screwdriver kit, opened up my laptop, chucked out the old and broken and put in the new. However, I failed to realize beforehand that the new hard drive would be empty and devoid of an OS system. Hence, I got a "No Operation System found" message when I booted up my laptop with the new hard drive. So, out to buy a new OS I go!

I never liked Vista much anyway, so I bought a copy of Windows XP Home, since it had been on my very first laptop (lasted almost 6 years without ANY issues) and proved extremely reliable and easy to use in my experience. During the XP installation, I stumbled upon a new problem where the installation fails and gives me a message about a hard drive error. The exact message is as follows:

"A PROBLEM HAS BEEN DETECTED AND WINDOWS HAS BEEN SUT DOWN TO PREVENT DAMAGE TO YOUR COMPUTER. IF THIS IS THE FIRST TIME YOU'VE SEEN THIS ERROR SCREEN RESTART YOUR COMPUTER. IF THIS SCREEN APPEARS AGAIN FOLLOW THESE STEPS:
CHECK FOR VIRUSES ON YOUR COMPUTER. REMOVE ANY NEWLY INSTALLED HARD DRIVES OR HARD DRIVE CONTROLLERS. CHECK YOUR HARD DRIVE TO MAKES SURE IT IS PROPERLY CONFIGURED AND TERMINATED. RUN CHKDISK /F TO CHECK FOR HARDDRIVE CORRUPTION, AND THEN RESTART YOUR COMPUTER.

***STOP: 0x0000007B (0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0X00000000) "

I am far from tech savvy and have no clue as to what this means. I’ve researched around for days in my free time, and I’ve read many things about needing the correct driver to disable the SATA something, stuff about slipstreaming a new XP CD (totally confused here), and just other random theories about putting the hard drive in an external case.

I’ve also browsed the forums and found help guides for downgrading from Vista to XP, but those guides assume it’s being done on a functioning computer with a functioning hard drive. I guess I feel stuck because my hard drive is new and completely empty to begin with. Either way, my brain is fatigued and I figured I'd save myself a big fat headache if I just directly asked in a forum full of all you magnanimous people out there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

 

Exactly what was the diagnosis of the repair shop?

You need to locate a sata driver and slipstream it onto an XP installation disk just like being mentioned in many guides out there and here. There is no way around it I am afraid other than going back to Vista (safe) or moving up to Windows 7 (best choice)

cheers ...

 

Windows XP is old and doesn't come with any SATA drivers, and therefore by itself will not be able to detect your hard drive at all (unless your BIOS has an option to run it in IDE mode, but not all manufacturers support this).

The solution is to feed it the proper drivers so it can actually detect and install on the SATA drive. The easiest way to do this is integrating them into the installation CD with nLite which is pretty foolproof (use the "Integrate Drivers" and "Create Bootable ISO" options on the task selection screen). Finding the right drivers may be the hardest part if the laptop came with Vista... check Sony's support pages if they offer XP drivers for it. If not, you may have to resort to experimenting with drivers from other models or generic drivers from the chipset manufacturer.

However, since the installer actually crashes instead of just showing you an empty list where you're supposed to select the install partition, you may have additional issues (could be hardware or not). Make sure your Windows CD has Service Pack 3 integrated already, if it doesn't nLite can do that as well.

 

STOP: 0x0000007B (parameter1, parameter2, parameter3, parameter4)
INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE

(googled from Microsoft's Knowledge Base Advanced troubleshooting for "Stop 0x0000007B" errors in Windows XP)

Fortunately that looks like inserting sata drivers into install image would solve the issue.

 

Thank you all for the feedback! I guess it looks like the slipstream thing is what I need to do. I'm not familiar with the nLite program at all or any of the described processes, but I will give it a try.

Wish me luck, and thanks to you all again!