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bchristoFlag for United States of America

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Vista won't boot after motherboard swap

I replaced the defective motherboard in my Dell XPS 410 with what I thought was the exact same motherboard.  When I try to boot Vista it immediately bluescreened with the Stop 0x0000007B error.  I tried booting from the Vista CD and repairing the installation, but it was not successful.  The Recovery Console does seem to recognize that Vista is installed, and it does actually recognize the user accounts on the system.

I tried running bootrec.exe and initially it didn't recognize the Vista installation, but I found a way to rebuilt the BCD and that worked, but I'm still not able to get past the Stop 0x7b error.  

I've found a lot online that suggests that I should remove the hard drive controller driver and then Vista should start up and install the new driver, but I'm not sure how to do that.  At this point I can only get into the Recovery Console, though from there I can run command prompt and open regedit.

I would really like to keep the existing Vista installation if possible.  The old motherboard has swollen and leaking capacitors, but it was functioning at a basic level so I could possibly put it back in and uninstall the existing controller driver, but it seems that there should be a way to make this work without having to do that.  Any suggestions as to how to do that would be greatly appreciated...
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rindi
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Check in the BIOS whether you can change the HD Controller's mode to compatibility or IDE mode. Don't use RAID or AHCI or legacy or something similar.
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Rindi - thank you.  I have looked in the BIOS and the choices are  RAID Autodetect/ATA and RAID ON.  It is currently set to RAID Autodetect/ATA, though RAID ON is the default setting...  Should I try switching it to RAID ON?  I almost did but I was given a message that made me worried about my data...
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nobus
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Hmm, I don't recall what the setting was on the original motherboard.  I know I didn't have a specific RAID configuration but it might have been on as the default setting...

I have checked and the new board has the latest version of the BIOS.  I am not sure what BIOS version was on the original board, or if that would matter...
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MASQUERAID - I did not order from Dell but supposedly it is one of their boards.  It looks the same as the original board.  The part number is WG855.  I don't have access to the box right not to provide the Service Tag, but can provide that later.  Thanks...
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Does it boot with a Dell logo or does the BIOS screen have Dell on the header?
I'm not in front of that computer but I'm pretty sure it does boot with the Dell logo.  Also, when I first booted it up, I went into the BIOS and put in the Service Tag.  I did not put in the Express Service Code, though when I went into the BIOS later there was a value there.  I didn't check it with the code on the box, though...
I went ahead and changed to the RAID ON setting and that worked.  That must have been the setting on the original motherboard...

Thanks everyone...