I'm having an issue that I've been working on for a while and its driving me nuts. I caught a virus a few weeks back (I think, couldn't actually find one) that filled up my C drive to capacity. I decided to just reformat and reinstall XP but everytime I try I get a stop error 0x0000007b. I googled it but haven't really gotten anywhere because I don't think its a harddrive or a driver issue and I'm a bit leery of playing around with flashing my BIOS.

I know it isn't my harddrive because I removed it and tested it with another and am getting the same error. I also checked my BIOS settings, with only one harddrive I don't use RAID (altho it is an option) so I don't think its a driver issue. I was able to install Linux and now I'm running Vista, although I don't really know what that tells me except that everything physically seems to be working fine. Also, I've twice now gotten a 'boot disk failure, insert system disk...' error prior to Vista starting up and then after I restart it worked fine again.

Sorry I don't have the exact specs on my computer. The motherboard is a Gigabyte with a 3ghz Pentium D chip with 1 Gig of ram (1 stick). Both harddrives I tried were western digital (one a 40 gig, the other was a 160, both IDE drives). At this point I don't even know if its a software or hardware problem - not too good with computers, so any help would be appreciated! Thanks!!

you could try resetting the mobo - look up the reset jumper pins in the mobo manual or on the net if you can get to it and short them as shown for a few secs.
Hope this helps

thanks for the response. i tried that, it didn't seem to help... In fact, now it won't run for more than a few minutes without freezing up. I don't think it is software related, because BIOS froze while I was checking my settings. I wouldn't know where to start with the hardware - I checked all the connections and everything seems fine. any other suggestions please?

does a visual inspection of the mobo show any signs of heat damage? - a common problem is 'fat caps' - the capacitors on the board overheat and bulge at the top; sometimes they leak too. If this has happened the mobo is u/s. Otherwise it does sound like a heat problem if it stops even before you get a chance to open the BIOS pages.

Motherboard looks fine, just a little dusty, I will have to dust it out later. I don't think it is a heat related problem, its only running at about 42 degrees c and all the fans are spinning fine. I removed some stuff (soundcard, extra usb slots) that I didn't need to try to get it down to more basic to see if that made a difference, and now when I cold boot, during BIOS I get the regular 1 beep 'ok' from the POST, but it also (at the same time) is giving me a 10 - 15 second long singular alarm beep - the kind you get when its running hot - except it only holds for those 10 seconds and then continues on its way. It runs fine now though, I had it on for a few hours without issue. so now what did I do to it?

perhaps one of the cards you removed was part of the problem? The meaning of the long POST beep depends on the BIOS on the board - have a look at the Gigabyte site for more detail to see what it was and then maybe visit http://www.bioscentral.com/beepcodes to find out what your codes mean.