[SOLVED] Persistant Blue Screen even with safe mode and different OS installations - Mystery!

[foxhound525]

Asus Sabertooth 990fx R2.0
FX8370 overclocked to 4.7Ghz (stable)
8GBx2 DDR3 1600mhz (XMP)
1x SSD
2x HDD

So I am at a bit of a loss with this one. This machine has been working absolutely fine for years, it used to run windows 7 as my main rig, then I upgraded to win 10, then I got a new motherboard (sabertooth) as my old one had terrible VRMs (Biostar TA970+ v5), then very recently I got a new ryzen 3800x machine, and moved all of my main SSDs and HDDs over to that. My old second PC was an AMD Phenom II X4 925 with 8GB RAM and windows 7, running on the old Biostar board that got usurped by the sabertooth.

So obviously it made sense to move my 2nd pc SSDs/HDDs over to my sabertooth rig as that rig's machine spirit was now empty. I moved my drives to my 3800x rig with no problems whatsoever, but this has not been the case for the phenom > FX8370 move. When I boot into windows, I get as far as the 'starting windows' screen, and then it rapidly bluescreens and restarts. This wasn't completely unexpected, but the persistence of the problem is. This is the bluescreen

I have:

• Used Macrium reflect to restore an older image of that win 7 installation and overwrite the current one. Still bluescreens.
• Run in safe mode, still bluescreens.
• Used win7 installation media to repair both versions of win 7 (before macrium and after), repairs always fail.
• used macrium reflect repair boot option, still bluescreens.
• Disconnecting all other HDDs and usb devices, still bluescreens.
• running chkdsk via command prompt. This failed as the drive was being picked up as read only. Then removed the read only restriction, then eventually got it to run with chkdsk /f. It repaired some stuff apparently, still bluescreens in exactly the same way though.

It may be worth noting that all of my OS SSDs are MBR, and all of my bios' are set to both legacy and uefi modes. Both my main and second pc SSDs worked just fine before, and my win10 SSD (MBR) was in the rig I'm currently having issues with and ran just fine with the same bios settings. What really confuses me is that this bluescreen has been the same across 2 different Win7 OS installations, so I don't think the OS itself is at fault here. The SSD in question is pretty new ( a few months old) so It doesn't seem likely that it's failed, and macrium can restore to it without issues too. What the nature of the problem is; for once has me completely stumped. Macrium literally erased the contents of the drive, and chkdsk supposedly fixed any errors, yet I still get the bluescreen every time. 100% not anything virus related. Anyone got any ideas?

And I can't do a fresh OS install before anyone suggests it, as I probably won't be able to activate it without the key which is long gone.

 

[Fix_that_Glitch]

Have you tried marking C: partition as ACTIVE ?

 

[Zerk2012]

So your moving drives from one motherboard to another without doing a fresh windows install sorry to say but doing a fresh install should of been the first step.

 

[foxhound525]

Have you tried marking C: partition as ACTIVE ?

Yeah I think I did that in the Macrium recovery environment, but I'll try again. I think I'm getting closer to the issue though; I just tried starting the fresh windows 7 installation procedure to see what would happen and it instantly complained about missing drivers. To be fair, when I originally migrated onto this motherboard I was using windows 10 rather than 7, so it might be the case that 10 found drivers automatically whereas 7 can't. I'm currently loading up all the motherboard drivers onto a stick to see if I can force windows RE to load them.

I probably could just to a fresh win7 install if there is some way to extract the windows activation key from an image. I can browse the image, but I can't run it virtually unfortunately. I don't know of any ways to extract the activation code from the file system

Edit: I didn't notice until now, but the device driver that is missing is for the CD/DVD drive that is connected via SATA that I didn't even consider. Going to remove that and try everything again

 

[foxhound525]

So your moving drives from one motherboard to another without doing a fresh windows install sorry to say but doing a fresh install should of been the first step.
You can try undoing all your overclocks.

Heard it all before mate, done it several times without issues before so it can be done. This one has been more tricky, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't be beaten. If you know of a way to extract a windows activation code from a windows image I'm all ears, otherwise that's not a very productive comment but thanks anyway.

 

[Zerk2012]

Heard it all before mate, done it several times without issues before so it can be done. This one has been more tricky, but that doesn't necessarily mean it can't be beaten. If you know of a way to extract a windows activation code from a windows image I'm all ears, otherwise that's not a very productive comment but thanks anyway.

You were asking how to fix it and I told you I think it was very productive. You can run windows 10 on them without activating it.

 

[foxhound525]

You were asking how to fix it and I told you I think it was very productive. You can run windows 10 on them without activating it.

Well I've tried everything I can conceivably think of other than doing a redeploy to new hardware with macrium; but you have to have the paid version to do that and that costs waaaaaaaay too much.

I did a fresh win7 install and weirdly enough it worked. So why my windows7 image wouldn't work doesn't make much sense to me. I had all the drivers on a stick but the windows RE wouldnt let me choose the driver folders or the .sys files as it kept saying something like there are no files for your computer. But then when doing the installation I could load the drivers no problem (?)

But Windows 7 wouldn't let me update it properly, hitting me with errors after like 5 updates. So I was like no problem, I'll just grab SP1 myself. Nope. Microsoft are a bunch of ****

[Note: Moderator edit to remove barely disguised profane and sexist language. Remember that this is a family friendly forum.]

and don't allow you to download SP1 from the website anymore. I can't even 'upgrade' to win10 because I don't have an activation key and it doesn't let you progress.

So utterly annoyed right now.

 

[Zerk2012]

Well I've tried everything I can conceivably think of other than doing a redeploy to new hardware with macrium; but you have to have the paid version to do that and that costs waaaaaaaay too much.

I did a fresh win7 install and weirdly enough it worked. So why my windows7 image wouldn't work doesn't make much sense to me. I had all the drivers on a stick but the windows RE wouldnt let me choose the driver folders or the .sys files as it kept saying something like there are no files for your computer. But then when doing the installation I could load the drivers no problem (?)

But Windows 7 wouldn't let me update it properly, hitting me with errors after like 5 updates. So I was like no problem, I'll just grab SP1 myself. Nope. Microsoft are a bunch of c**ts and don't allow you to download SP1 from the website anymore. I can't even 'upgrade' to win10 because I don't have an activation key and it doesn't let you progress.

So utterly annoyed right now.

You can download the W10 ISO and install it without a key.

 

[USAFRet]

Heard it all before mate, done it several times without issues before so it can be done.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, sometimes it works, sort of.
I've personally seen all 3 outcomes.

Past results are no indication of future success.

 

[foxhound525]

Sometimes it works, sometimes it fails, sometimes it works, sort of.
I've personally seen all 3 outcomes.

Past results are no indication of future success.

Perhaps not, but it is an indication of the possibility of future success

Well I think I might have figured out part of where I've been going wrong. When you restore a macrium image, you can choose to restore the main partition and the system reserved partition, and when the destination SSD is slightly smaller than the drive the original image was on (as is the case here) this requires a bit of tweaking and then dragging the system reserved part down onto the destination disk. Because both partitions on the image were ticked, I assumed it was restoring both, but I wasn't paying enough attention. Still doesn't explain why my original win7 installation didn't work before Macrium even got involved, but anyway I think I might have thought up a solution.

I had an image of an older win10 installation that was installed on my FX-8370 machine before I switched over to the 3800x machine, so technically it should have all the right drivers because that's what it was installed on originally. I'm going to try and restore that! Just luck that I still have it as I was going to replace that image with the new one from the 3800x but didn't get around to it.

 

[USAFRet]

Perhaps not, but it is an indication of the possibility of future success

Well I think I might have figured out part of where I've been going wrong. When you restore a macrium image, you can choose to restore the main partition and the system reserved partition, and when the destination SSD is slightly smaller than the drive the original image was on (as is the case here) this requires a bit of tweaking and then dragging the system reserved part down onto the destination disk. Because both partitions on the image were ticked, I assumed it was restoring both, but I wasn't paying enough attention. Still doesn't explain why my original win7 installation didn't work before Macrium even got involved, but anyway I think I might have thought up a solution.

I had an image of an older win10 installation that was installed on my FX-8370 machine before I switched over to the 3800x machine, so technically it should have all the right drivers because that's what it was installed on originally. I'm going to try and restore that! Just luck that I still have it as I was going to replace that image with the new one from the 3800x but didn't get around to it.

As said...sometimes it works. Sometimes.

Recovering a Macrium Image to a smaller drive is generally no problem. In the same system.

Moving to a whole different system IS the issue.

 

[SkyNetRising]

Anyone got any ideas?

0x0000007B error means - sata controller settings in BIOS are wrong.
Usual options - AHCI, IDE, RAID. You have to find the correct one.

 

[foxhound525]

0x0000007B error means - sata controller settings in BIOS are wrong.
Usual options - AHCI, IDE, RAID. You have to find the correct one.

Aha now this is the kind of specificity I was hoping for. Thank you for clarifying that. The unfortunate part is that I've already checked that in BIOS; it's set to AHCI which as far as I'm aware is the correct option for regular non-array SATA SSDs & HDDs? I don't have any IDE drives installed and no RAID arrays either.

That being said, the original (non image) win7 installation that originally bluescreened used to have an IDE optical drive installed at one point in it's life. That was on a different motherboard, but the driver may have still been floating around. I can't remember if I cleaned the drivers up on that system after changing from the microstar 760gm-e51 board it was on before I moved it to the old biostar TA970+ v5 that it was on not long ago (right before this switch). Again I've done lots of motherboard switches and all have worked fine up until now!