My trusty machine recently suffered fatal motherboard injuries
Windows 7, highly customized on about 8 year old hardware
I have put together a new system and installed Windows 10 with all latest drivers
I created a PE Rescue disk in that environment
Restored a very recent image of the dead machine to its own ssd
Booted into PE enviromnent and invoked redeploy

I have had a variety of results on rebooting
- sometimes "windows cannot start ... insert windows media and perform system repair
- sometimes windows starts and offers to repair itself
- sometimes windows starts and then a blue screen stop 0x0000007b

After many cycles trying everthing I can think of ...
- install new AMD AHCI drivers in Win 10 and rebuild PE
- trying to load other drivers from within redeploy
all ultimately with the same result ...

I have already spent too much time on this, but if anyone has any suggestions ...
... or maybe just a kind word

Is the ReDeploy wizard showing any devices as not having drivers available that you’re not supplying manually, or is it indicating that everything went ok? If you built new Rescue Media on your new PC while it was running Win10 but are trying to restore Win7, ReDeploy might be attempting to load incompatible drivers. You could try building a clean Win7 environment on your new system and building media from that. Also, what PE version is the Rescue Media itself running? If it’s newer than PE 3.1 (Win7) you may have the same problem. Same if you’re supplying drivers manually but are providing Win10 drivers rather than Win7.

Is your new motherboard configured to support Legacy booting rather than just UEFI? I think I remember seeing an error like this if you have a board that only supports UEFI but not its compatibility mode AND your Win7 disk is set up in GPT layout since Win7 doesn’t fully support UEFI boot.

Lastly, this is a bit of a long shot, but are you sure Windows 7 will even run on your new hardware? Newer Intel processors don’t support Windows 7, although admittedly I think it still loads on those processors rather than exhibiting the behavior you’re seeing. Not sure about AMD though.

Thanks for the excellent reply as usual
I like the idea of a clean install of win 7 on the new hardware ...
a big but ...

you're last point is not a long shot -
according to the mobo manual
win 7 can run on the new hardware, but only the 64 bit version
and guess what - mine is 32 bit

I suppose I should have thought of that, especially with various major OSs abandoning 32 bit these days
Just out of curiosity, what aspect of a motherboard would make it unable to run 32 bit windows?

Thanks for your help
At least i learned quite a lot about using redeploy!

So the problem is the motherboard, and it only freezes out 32-bit Windows 7? I’m not sure why that might be, but I have two guesses:

- The motherboard maps memory address space for certain devices embedded on the board above the 4GB range, which 32-bit OSes typically can’t use. There’s a technique to get around this to a degree called PAE (Physical Address Extension), but I know it has some limitations, so that might not solve this problem. I haven’t looked into that mechanism extensively.

- The motherboard will only boot in UEFI mode, which 32-bit Windows 7 can’t do (and even 64-bit Windows 7 can’t do without allowing Legacy Option ROMs). This seems a highly unlikely limitation at this point though.

Unfortunately there’s no in-place upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit for any Windows OS. On the bright side, you’ll now be able to use more than 4GB of memory! And actually, even if this HAD worked, unless your Windows 7 license came from a retail purchase, you might have faced problems getting Windows to activate again on your new hardware. Retail licenses are transferable to new PCs, but OEM licenses are explicitly not transferable, and since you can’t buy new Windows 7 licenses anymore, you could have been stuck in that case.

+x

 

jphughan - 28 January 2018 7:28 PM

So the problem is the motherboard, and it only freezes out 32-bit Windows 7? I’m not sure why that might be, but I have two guesses:

- The motherboard maps memory address space for certain devices embedded on the board above the 4GB range, which 32-bit OSes typically can’t use. There’s a technique to get around this to a degree called PAE (Physical Address Extension), but I know it has some limitations, so that might not solve this problem. I haven’t looked into that mechanism extensively.

- The motherboard will only boot in UEFI mode, which 32-bit Windows 7 can’t do (and even 64-bit Windows 7 can’t do without allowing Legacy Option ROMs). This seems a highly unlikely limitation at this point though.

Unfortunately there’s no in-place upgrade path from 32-bit to 64-bit for any Windows OS. On the bright side, you’ll now be able to use more than 4GB of memory! And actually, even if this HAD worked, unless your Windows 7 license came from a retail purchase, you might have faced problems getting Windows to activate again on your new hardware. Retail licenses are transferable to new PCs, but OEM licenses are explicitly not transferable, and since you can’t buy new Windows 7 licenses anymore, you could have been stuck in that case.

OK, so not being one to back off from a challenge ...
I was in fact able to install windows 7 32-bit on the new hardware.
The only driver which I cannot find is for the USB3.1 controllers - not surprising.
I prepared a PE 3.1 disc in that new environment and went through the usual steps

What I now know from booting in safe mode and watching the drivers load,
is that Redeploy has in fact doing a fine job - all along windows has been "starting", but ...
actual startup is being prevented by some unknown driver - I'd put money on ATI video drivers.
Sadly this board/cpu combo does not support on-board graphics so I can only test with a discrete graphics card
(I guess I could try another card ...)
I even went as far as copying the entire system32/drivers directory from the new, good win 7 install to the old, bad one
- still the same blue screen

Windows booting in safe mode shows the drivers that have already been installed, but not the one that is just about to be installed
and is preventing the system from starting.
So I have no idea which one it is - and the minidump option is apparently switched off

Anyway this is all just for entertainment now as I have windows 10 all set up and tweaked as I like it
It is a great OS (once all the privacy holes are blocked)!

Just fyi