Originally published on JS PACS, May 8, 2009.
This troubleshooting tip relates to rebuilding PACS workstations on the HP xw series platform. A lot of PACS workstations these days run on this platform, many of them the HP xw4300 or xw8600. There are many models in the series, but their price and performance have been very attractive, and they are one of our preferred platforms.
This issue doesn’t occur all the time, but some of these workstations hit you with the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death, with an error of 0x0000007B, which is a device-inaccessible error) when trying to install Windows XP Pro from the install disc.
The issue is related to the onboard RAID controller that some of these devices come with, or the lack of LSI drivers for the hard drive controller. Either will cause the Windows install to fail, but here are some steps to get through it.
First, if you get the BSOD on the Windows install, check the BIOS, and under Storage Options disable the RAID controller, setting it to IDE Independent. This will allow the Windows installer to see the boot sector of the drive and prevent the install from failing.
If you still get the error, you may need to add the LSI drivers during the Windows install. There are two ways to do this. First, download the correct LSI drivers for your model from the HP website and extract them onto a workstation you have access to. You can then put them on a floppy, and during the Windows install there is a point where you will see “Press F6 to install third party SCSI drivers” at the bottom of the screen. Press F6 and you will be presented with a section that allows you to load those drivers into the install process. Given that not many workstations ship with floppy drives these days, the second method might be the better solution.
That second solution involves creating a new install disc that contains the LSI drivers. There is a great free product called nLite that will let you do this. There is good documentation on the nLite site, so I won’t go into the details of using the software, but suffice it to say that this tool lets you rebuild your install disc and include the drivers you need (such as the LSI drivers). As a side note, there are a lot of other things you can add to the install disc, such as service packs, additional programs, and registry edits, that will all be included in the install.
Once you have the disc built, pop it in the CD drive, fire up the workstation, and the install should go smoothly.