My T43 is sick (VERY, VERY sloooooow), and I want to move the HD to a known working T42p. No matter what I do, this results in a BSOD, error 0000007B (number of zeros might be wrong?). This HD is a WD160GB model WD1600BEVE, with WinXP SP2. I have two other HDs (Hitachi, Fujitsu) that work fine in either machine, with similar WinXP installs.

I tried the Windows Recovery from CD routine, but it refuses to recognize my admin pw.

I'm sure that a fresh XP install would work fine, but I have a couple of programs that have lost their install disks, and need to use them as-is on the old HD (don't ask...).

Any magic spells to help?

Thanks...

Hello and welcome to the Forum

This topic has been discussed before. Here are a couple of Forum threads discussing the viability of T42/T43 drive swap: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=85112 and viewtopic.php?f=2&t=88143

General consensus seems to be that it's a little problematic. (T40 to T41 to T42 drive swaps are very easy as discussed here: viewtopic.php?p=675783#p675783 but T40/41/42 to T43 (or vice versa) doesn't work well. There was a major hardware/software/firmware upgrade between T42 to T43 generation. If you tinker with it, you might eventually get it to boot up but the T43 setup is not really optimized for a T42p, so you might not only face blue screens now but unexpected blue screens later on. In my opinion it won't run as fast or as smoothly as a fresh T42p-specific installation. My own personal experience of drive-swapping between all of these models bears this out also.

Daniel.

If you still have a proper Windows XP install disk, you can do a repair-install XP over the old version.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/XPrepairinstall.htm

Success!

The old threads gave me some links, but it took some work to get the right info. The mostlycreative.com site is dead, so I dragged up an old version from the Internet archive at

http://web.archive.org/web/20090423080214/http://www.mostlycreativeworkshop.com/Article11.html

This appears to be based on an excellent Microsoft article titled "You receive a Stop 0x0000007B error after you move the Windows XP system disk to another computer":

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;314082

As it turned out, the correct *.sys drivers were already on my disk, and all I had to do was the registry merge. The hard part was getting ye olde T43 to limp along far enough to do the registry edit. It, too, was giving me BSODs towards the end of the boot, and even safe mode was locking up. I finally tracked this down to the fact that I had removed the CD drive from the T43 while the disk was out--this shouldn't have mattered in the least, but it was the culprit.

Then I popped the disk into the T42p, got a normal boot, added drivers for video, ethernet, and wlan, and everything was happy. Especially my wife, who got all her precious obsolete programs back and won't be forced to use evil Windows 7.

Thanks for the pointers...