This troubleshooting tip relates to rebuilding PACS workstations on the HP xw series platforms. A lot of PACS workstations these days are running on this particular platform, many being the HP xw 4300 or xw8600. There are many models in the series but their price and performance have been very attractive and are one of our preferred platforms.
This issue doesn’t occur all the time but there are some of those workstations that hit you with the dreaded BSOD (Blue Screen of Death with an error of 0x0000000007B – which is a device inaccessible error) when trying to install Windows XP Pro from the install disk.
The particular 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 take to get through that issue.
First, if you get the BSOD on 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 those drivers onto a workstation you have access to. You can then put those onto a floppy drive and during the windows install; there is a point where you will see the message “Press F6 to install third party SCSI drivers” at the bottom of the screen. When you see this, press F6 and then you will be presented with a section that allows you to load those drivers into the install process. Given that not too many workstations ship with floppy drives these days, the second method might be a much better solution.
That second solution involves created a new install disk that that contains those LSI drivers. To do this, there is a great FREE product called nLite that will allow you to do this. This software can be downloaded at http://www.nliteos.com/ . There is good documentation on that site so I won’t go into the details of using that software but suffice it to say that this tool allows you to 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 disk such as service packs, additional programs, registry edits etc, that will all be included in the install.
Once you have the disk built, pop it in your CD drive, fire up the workstation and the install should go smoothly.
If you have any related experiences install Windows XP Pro onto the HP xw series workstations, post them in the JSPACS Forum - PACS Troubleshooting section and let the community know how you solved those issues.
