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I have encountered a serious problem accessing my hard drive and booting up Windows XP. I am running windows XP on a Dell 8400 dimension workstation. I am getting the infamous blue screen of death with the error message 0x0000007B. I suspect that I am a victim of a virus . As suggested I ran a repair from a Windows CD recovery disk and it seemed to run okay and indicated that everything was fine however when I rebooted I still received the same old blue screen. . Help Mode is of no help as the options all lead me back to the blue screen. Therefore I tried something different.

I booted up from the Windows Recovery CD and when prompted hit the letter R on the first screen which placed me into a C:\windows prompt. From there I was able to go to the root directory and I was able to list the folders that have my data in them. However when I attempted to open these folders I received an error message of "Access is denied" and could go no further. I checked the attributes on these directories and they are only showing an attribute of d=directory. I tried different things with the attrib command to see if I could get around the access problem but to no avail.

I ran a chkdsk /p and it came back indicating that there were no problems. I am running out of options and am quickly reaching the point where I am considering doing a complete reinstall of windows, however I don't want to lose my data. Can anyone suggest how I might be able to access my data files and skirt around that "access is denied" message? Thank you

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by caperjack

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A concise recovery-first plan and explanation based on the symptoms reported by and the suggestions from .

The 0x0000007B stop code means Windows cannot access the system volume at boot. The fact that a recovery prompt can list folders but returns "Access is denied" when opening them points to one of three common causes: NTFS permission or EFS encryption on the files, the limited privileges of the recovery environment, or a disk/boot-level problem that is confusing the OS. Reinstalling the OS now risks overwriting or losing data; securing the files first is the priority.

Recommended sequence (preserve data before repair):

  1. Make a full, bit-for-bit image of the drive to an external disk (this preserves the current state and allows safe experimentation).
  2. Access that image or the original drive from a different environment that bypasses Windows boot/ACL restrictions — for example by attaching the drive as a secondary disk to another machine or booting a live OS/WinPE. From there, copy user folders to another disk.
  3. If files remain unreadable after mounting elsewhere, confirm whether Windows EFS (file encryption) was used — encrypted files cannot be decrypted without the original user certificate/key.
  4. Once data is secured, proceed with diagnostics and repair: check RAM and cables (as @caperjack suggested), run drive SMART/manufacturer diagnostics, then consider targeted boot repairs or MBR fixes on the image rather than the original drive.

Additional notes: If malware is suspected, work from the image and scan with a clean system; use recovery tools on copies, not the original. If disk imaging or offline access is unfamiliar, professional data-recovery services are the safest option to avoid accidental data loss.

Member Avatar for caperjack

chkdsk /p
try that again but add a /r
chkdsk /p /r

also blue screen can be caused by faulty ram

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