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9973
Duo blue screening
I
have an Inspiron Duo with an 320 GB Hitachi drive. The system began reporting a bad controller driver. I ran the diagnostics several times and it never saw a
problem with the drive. Finally, I gave up since I could not keep the machine booted for more than 5 minutes I decided to reinstall from the drive. Note I
don't have a separate DVD for the reinstall. I am now getting a different error. I am getting a blue screen stop code of 0x0000007b (0x80786b58,
0xc0000000d, 0x000000000, 0x00000000). I have run the diagnostics repeatedly and never gotten an error. I have done the Regedit and checked the two
places Microsoft said to look for issues (iaStorV and msahci). I have verified that the BIOS is set to AHCI I have tried the toggling it to ATA and back without a fix, but I did get a slightly different error. I have run the fixboot, fixmbr, and rebuildBCD. The automated repair fails for what it is worth reporting a failure in setup. Is this a controller issue or am I looking at replacing the drive? Any other ideas of what I need to look at or work on?
Jon57
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November 27th, 2012 17:00
Well after trying multiple times to use the Dell Recovery to put the machine back to default I finally downloaded the Windows 8 90 day evaluation and tried it. Machine is faster than it was with Windows 7 and everything is working like a charm. Now I just need to look and see if I have the DVD to do a full restore of Windows 7 and then upgrade it to Windows 8. I will NEVER purchase a machine with only a recovery partition again. What good is the recovery if it is faulty from the factory?
Thank you for your assistance! At least you confirmed what I had already tried and that it was not just me.
osprey4
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September 19th, 2012 06:00
Hi jon57,
Exactly what did you do to "reinstall from the drive"? Do you mean you restored the factory hard drive image?
Are you sure the error refers to a "bad controller driver"? A driver is software. It does not mean your hard drive is bad.
osprey4
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September 19th, 2012 17:00
If you reimage the drive, there is zero chance of any virus, so I wouldn't worry about that.
The error is normally associated with having a setting of AHCI in the BIOS without any RAID controller drivers. So my suggestion would be to boot to the BIOS and leave the controller setting on ATA.
Jon57
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September 19th, 2012 17:00
Yes restored to factory image is what I did. I got the "bad controller driver" before I restored the factory image. It was blue screening the machine after about 5 minutes MOL with that message. I updated the BIOS and the controller driver but neither helped. I figured I had nothing to lose at that point so I backed up what I could and then tried to re-image back to factory. I have also scanned the drive for viruses both from within Windows (before the reimage) and several times using Linux USB boots. No viruses were found. I have run the diagnostics multiple times no errors were reported. When doing the virus scans from within Windows they would complete and then blue screen. One time it blue screened during the Windows scan. Once I did that I am now blue screening and getting the stop code I gave. I have actually tried 3 times to put the factory image back on same blue screen same stop code each time after the restart.
Jon57
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September 19th, 2012 18:00
I will try that tonight. Should I try to reimage again with the BIOS set to ATA? I know at this point it was set to AHCI but will try it and get back to you later maybe in the morning.
osprey4
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September 20th, 2012 12:00
Yes, go ahead and try to reimage with the controller set to ATA.
Jon57
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September 23rd, 2012 10:00
No good I got a slightly different error code but the same 0x7b. The full error code is stop: 0x0000007b (0x80786b58, 0xc0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). There are still no errors in the Dell diagnostics and it still will not let me load Windows. I will be when I have the time do search of the technical articles on the Microsoft site and see if someone else has had the same issue and found a solution. Thank you for your idea.
osprey4
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September 24th, 2012 05:00
If you are sure the drive itself is ok, the next idea would be to perform a clean installation of the operating system. I've got a link to Natakuc's guides for doing so below.
osprey4
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November 28th, 2012 04:00
Glad to hear that worked.
The recovery partition is actually helpful 90% of the time, but there are times when a clean install is the better path forward.