What can cause a BSOD when booting from CD, but not from Hard Disk?

1

We have a Windows XP machine that recently had a bad virus cleaned up off of it. It boots up just fine, however I suspect some windows files have been damaged and want to run a Repair from the original Windows CD.

The problem is, booting from the CD causes a BSOD with a Stop Message of 0x0000007B: INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. The CD starts to load, and says its copying files, then after a minute or so it gives the BSOD.

We know this CD works on other machines so it's not the CD, but we tried some other boot CDs anyways with the same result. We've also tried running chkdsk and fixmbr, and even swapped the CD-ROM drive since it was making a weird clicking noise while reading a CD, and we thought that might be the problem.

I was going to wipe the HDD completely and reload the OS, but I don't want to turn the HDD into an ugly paperweight if it can't read a boot disk to reload the OS. Afterall, it does still work even if a few programs crash unexpectedly at specific points.

So what can cause a computer to BSOD when booting from CD, but not from HDD? And is there anything I can do to fix this?

windows-xp
boot
bsod
boot-cd
asked on Super User Jul 16, 2012 by Rachel

1 Answer

-1

Yeah i've seen a computer BSOD booting a CD. I keep 2 CD/DVD drives in a computer to deal with and test problems (BSOD aside).

It can be the CD(physically the CD, or the data when it was put onto the CD), it can be the CD Drive, it can be the cable, it can be the connector.

So try changing those things.

I see you haven't mentioned trying to change the cable or connector. (by connector, I mean the connector on the motherboard which the drive is connected to)

It's easy to try changing those if you already have 2 CD drives in there.

answered on Super User Jul 16, 2012 by barlop

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