Thursday, October 08, 2009

STOP 0x0000007B on P2V'd Windows 7

I have neglected this blog terribly, but I wanted to get this out there because I know I'll forget and I know others will find it useful.

So for reasons fully understood and accepted, my employer has stated that we may no longer use Windows 7 on laptops in the short term. The carrot is that we may run it as a VM if we wish. Fantastic! As I've done many times in the past with XP, I'll just P2V my Win7 laptop and run it in VMWare Player (3.0 RC, so I can get Aero). Only one problem. As before, I used the VMware vCenter Converter 4.0 to P2V my laptop expecting the angels to sing. No so much. Got a STOP 0x0000007B on boot. With automatic reboot on error enabled, it also manifests itself as a Windows Boot Manager error, Status: 0xc0000225, Info: The boot selection failed because a required device is inaccessible.

So off to Google I went. For two days I played with DiskPart and BCDEdit. Learned a lot, but made no headway. Until I found this:
http://minasi.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=31980

Yes, that's right... It's a simple, old fasioned mass storage driver issue. The hitch is that drivers are there but not enabled in an effort to improve boot performance. The article on Minasi's site offers a pretty good explanation for Hyper-V, and the same applies to VMware. I took slightly different (and less complicated, I think) steps to resolve the issue without having to re-do the P2V:
  1. Mount the Win7 DVD in VMware Player and boot to it.
  2. At the first screen (Language Selection), hit Shift-F10 for a command prompt.
  3. Run Regedit.
  4. Load the system hive from the VM's disk:
    1. Highlight HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE
    2. File > Load Hive
    3. Select &lt c: &gt \Windows\System32\config\system (name it something like "asdf")
  5. Expand HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\asdf\ControlSet1\Services\intelide
  6. Change the data for value "Start" from "3" to "0".
  7. File > Unload Hive.
  8. Exit regedit.
  9. Reboot the VM.
Voila! Hear the angles sing!