BSOD after disabling some drivers

[doveman]

In an attempt to to try and fix a problem I've been having with LiveTV in Mediaportal regularly freezing momentarily, which I was advised is most likely due to some device driver or other causing problems, I tried to uninstall the Logmein mirror driver first via Device Manager (I'd already uninstalled Logmein a while ago but it hadn't removed this). I also had a couple of virtual NICs for Virtualbox and VMware, which were disabled in Network Connections ('m using bridge mode for both, which doesn't use these virtual NICs), so I uninstalled those from Device Manager as well.

After that, it was just BSOD on rebooting, even in Safe Mode, so I booted into my other Windows 7 and loaded the broken one's System Hive and deleted the leftover references to the Logmein drivers (and removed the driver files from system32\drivers) and also removed the references to the Virtualbox and VMware virtual NICs (but not the bridge drivers, which are listed as items under the real NIC, and which I need as I use Bridge mode). I also edited ControlSet002 but only removed the LogMeIn references from that.

After that, ControlSet001 (default) still BSOD but thankfully ControlSet002 (LastKnownGood) now works. I wouldn't have thought removing the references to the Virtualbox and VMware virtual NIC drivers, thus preventing them from loading, should cause it to BSOD on booting, but that does seem to be the case. Removing the Logmein mirror driver hasn't helped with the Mediaportal problem anyway, so I still need to find the proper way to remove the virtual NIC drivers to see if they're causing it. I guess I can just try exporting the entries from ControlSet002 and import them back into ControlSet001 for now, which should hopefully stop the latter BSOD on booting and then try and remove them again from the default (not by deleting them manually from the registry though, as that obviously doesn't work!), so at least I'll have a working ControlSet002 to fall back on.

Perhaps I'll just uninstall VMware and Virtualbox, which should be safe and then I can check whether that's fixed the problem and if not move on to uninstalling some other drivers.

[Tripredacus]

After that, it was just BSOD on rebooting,

What was the error? Did you look in Event Viewer?

[doveman]

What was the error? Did you look in Event Viewer?

I don't think it gets to write to the Event Viewer if it BSOD on boot. I checked the System log anyway and couldn't see anything. The BSOD was Stop 07B.

[Tripredacus]

So I take it that you don't get the error anymore? 0x7B is missing or corrupted Mass Storage Controller driver. Reinstall your chipset (or RAID if applicable) drivers to resolve it.

[doveman]

Yeah, I still get it if I try and boot normally (ControlSet001), only if I select LastKnownGood (ControlSet002) does it boot OK.

Strange that error, as I didn't mess with the Mass Storage Controller driver entries in the registry and the actual drivers are obviously not corrupted (otherwise ControlSet002 wouldn't boot) but I'll compare the settings for both ControlSets.