Awhile ago, I had a client that had purchased several of the same laptops for training purposes. Since all of the laptops were the same make and model, I setup 1 of the 10 as a master image that I had locked down so the trainees had limited access to the pc. Any changes made are automatically wiped after logout/reboot. For faster deployment of the laptops, I had created an image of the first laptop via Clonezilla (I am a big fan of Open Source).
A few years had gone by and there was an issue with one of the laptops. We checked the warranty status and found it was out of warranty. Rather than pay for repairs, it was cheaper to find a replacement on Amazon. Unfortunately, the one on Amazon had a different processor (not that big of a deal).
The new laptop arrived and I pushed out the image to the replacement laptop and when it booted we were greeted with the BSOD Stop 7B 0x0000007B. Rather than reload and reconfigure Windows from scratch I used a tool I had used in the past to help with this exact issue: fix_7hdc.vbs. To resolve this:
- Download fix_7hdc.vbs and copy the .vbs to a USB drive
- restart the pc.
- When the pc is restarting keep tapping the F8 key.
- When the Advanced Startup Options Menu appears, Select “Repair My Computer”
- In that window, select “Command Prompt”
- Insert your USB drive
- To find the drive letter of your USB drive via DOS prompt type: wmic logicaldisk get name,description
- Once you have the drive letter, goto that drive: e:
- Run the script via: cscript fix_7hdc.vbs /enable /search
- When the script is done, you are safe to reboot.
- Windows made it quite a bit further after reboot, but it still had issues so I rebooted into safe mode and logged in as the administrator and let Windows Find and install the drivers it was able to on its own. When completed I rebooted to Windows and downloaded the rest of the needed drivers and installed the latest Windows updates.