Windows 7 - STOP 0x7B and viruses

Great Thread !! Thanks for sharing the info with us John !!

- Captain

It was found in a "private" posting - and the blame was laid on atapi.sys or some other storage controller drivers (especially nVidia or Intel). In short, boot to another "live" OS and check to ensure that the storage drivers are the most updated version available (and that the date/time stamps are accurate).

SEPARATE ISSUE:

We also found smss.exe missing in several XP systems - evidenced by STOP 0x6F errors and due to McAfee (this isn't the same issue as the svchost.exe problem with McAfee Enterprise). Replacing it (in PE mode) fixes the issue. Replacing it with the wrong version gave us a STOP 0x71 error

Someone is on a mission..

First, my apologies for commenting to this thread due to it's age. This is the exact issue that I am dealing with. My HDD works fine as the slave but not the master drive.

My question is this. Will I be able to make the necessary repairs to the drivers if the drive is a slave or should I make it the master and boot with a Live CD? Secondly, should I run a virus / malware scan it prior to attempting the repairs called out below?

Thank you.

It depends on what's causing this. Recently we've seen an increase in infections by the TDSS rootkit.
At work we clean the partition table of it with Trend Micro's command line scanner - which renders the system unbootable.
Then we run Startup Repair 3 times from an installation disk.
If that doesn't allow the system to boot, then we go into a Command Prompt and run:

and

So far that has fixed every instance of this infection. Every system that I've tried it on has been SATA - so I don't have any knowledge about the Slave/Master differences.

BUT, be aware that I am not an anti-malware professional - so backup your stuff BEFORE trying any of this!