[cplkittle]

I know how to repair most issues with my laptop and desktop, but this one is beyond me. First of all, I let my laptop (gateway MX6920 / XP media center edition SP 2) shut off when the battery died. Tried to restart it and I got to the blue windows loading screen with the scrolling bar at the bottom in the little box. it scrolled for an hour and never started, so I had to turn it off manually. Next restart I got the "sorry for the inconvenience but windows did not shut down properly the last time... what do you want to do? start in safe mode, safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt, last known good configuration...." I tried them all one at a time. The next screen I got was the "press F11 to start recovery" I didn't press anything and let it count down, then it just keeps repeating the press F11 over and over and never goes anywhere. so I tried a few other things:
boot from disc: loads windows installer = no hard disk found
bought brand new hard drive and external hard drive case (USB)
installed new hard drive and boot from disk = same thing
boot from origional hard drive connected to USB = no hard drive found
installed windows on new hard drive connected through USB - install complete - restarted computer and got same F11 loop
restart pressing F8 = F11 loop
about the 50th try the computer booted normally but it took a LONG time to load windows. after that it ran fine, but I don't remember what I did. I backed up everything that would fit on 2 4gig memory sticks, and installed the software that came with the external hard drive reader.
restarted computer = F11 loop again

Reinstalled new hard drive, started computer, went to boot menu, selected cd drive with windows disk in. When it said press any key to boot from CD, I did nothing, this skips the F11 screen and starts to load windows, but halfway through the load I get the blue screen of death with this code:
*** STOP: 0x0000007b (0xF79DD524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Can anyone tell me what the problem is?

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Have you tried connecting the HDs to another computer to make sure they work properly. This will allow you to run HD diagnostic tests etc. If they are fine, you are looking at a dying mainboard (what I suspect anyways) . To me the tale-tale thing is that it did not recognize the other HD either. Now there is a very slim chance you just received another bad drive, but that is a really small chance and hooking them up to another computer will tell you what you need to know.

The 7b stop code is can't find the HD or corrupt installation error (either way related to the HD).

[PedroDaGR8]

Have you tried connecting the HDs to another computer to make sure they work properly. This will allow you to run HD diagnostic tests etc. If they are fine, you are looking at a dying mainboard (what I suspect anyways) . To me the tale-tale thing is that it did not recognize the other HD either. Now there is a very slim chance you just received another bad drive, but that is a really small chance and hooking them up to another computer will tell you what you need to know.

The 7b stop code is can't find the HD or corrupt installation error (either way related to the HD).

[cplkittle]

I did a little more research and found that the 7b code also means that I might be missing the SATA driver. I downloaded it and put it on cd and usb, but windows will not recognize it during the installation. If I lost the SATA driver, that would confuse me even more because the computer did start up once but it was real slow, so I was thinking it might be a bad read head or possibly a bad read head and a corrupt Sata driver that only works when it wants to. I will see if I can access both hard drives with my new external hard drive reader on my wife's desktop. I wish I had found this site earlier last week, I was all over Kentucky. I would have paid you dearly if you could have fixed my computer.

Edited by cplkittle, 19 April 2009 - 01:45 PM.

[h18wheeler]

Just checking to see if you were able to ever fix this problem as I have the exact same laptop and the exact same problem! Any solution or diagnosis? Thanks!