Z600 Win7 Bootfail Only With Hyperthreading After Dual CPU Upgrade

[PGquestion]

I have a Z600, Boot Block 1/30/09, running a generic Windows 7 x64 operating system.  I just upgraded the machine from an E5520 to dual X5570 processors.  The Z600 boots without any problem.  However, if I activate hyperthreading in the bios, the Z600 hangs on boot.

Upon reboot, the Z600 hangs at the exact same spot (when the Windows starting is displayed).

Upon failure (with hyperthreading enabled), I've run startup repair and it says it cannot fix the problem.  The problem signatures are 6.1.7600.16385 and 21198350.

I ran Intel diagnostics and the computer passed all the tests.

The exact same errors and behavior occur every time hyperthreading is enabled.

As soon as I disable the hyperthreading, the computer starts just fine.

I'm obviously missing something... Any suggestions are certainly welcome!  Fortunately, I'm happy to use the 8 cores... I'm just a bit curious about what I've missed.

Thanks!

[DGroves]

only thing i can sugust is to try to first getermine if it's a hardware or software issue

download these two bootable util iso's  bob ohms win 10 repair iso, and ultimate boot cd

burn them to a DVD or make a bootable USB key using rufus

go into the bios and reset it to default settings

reboot the z600 with hyperthereading enabled and run some of utils on both disks

the bob ohm disk is win 10 PE

the ultimate utility cd is linux based

if these disks also crash with hyper-threading on you have a hardware issue most likely (bad cpu/bad motherboard bent pins on cpu socket)

if the util disks load, and have no problems you have a software issue most likely

[PGquestion · Accepted solution]

Thanks DGroves! 

I did not exactly follow your suggestion BUT.... Your suggestion reminded me of a slightly different option...

First, I rand Belarc Advisor to confirm what was already installed on the Z600 (running on a Samsung SSD).

Then I replaced the SSD with an old backup harddrive into the Z600 and did a clean install of Windows 7 with the hyperthreading enabled.  The installation was successful.  The Z600 ran perfectly.

Next, I rebooted the Z600 using [F9] to make sure the old backup hard drive booted as primary along with the orginal SSD drive.

With both drives active, I then copied all of the important files from the SSD drive to the old backup.

Then I removed the backup drive and did a clean installation of Windows 7 onto the SSD drive...

All worked perfectly.

I then reinstalled the old backup [I wanted to make certain I did not destroy the important old files] and recopied the files back to the SSD with the new installation of Windows 7... and reinstalled all the main software (referencing the output from the Belarc Advisor).  I also needed to reinstall some drivers for the video card and the USB PCIE card... but there were no further surprises.  ALL worked.

So... in the end, it appears to be a software issue in Windows 7. The exact cause will never be known... but I now have a fully functional Z600 running dual X5570 processors using hyperthreading on a Windowns 7 machine... which is a particularly good thing since my Z600 is a dedicated computer for processing scanning off of a Konica Minolta PS5000C MKII book scanner (and occassionally, the processing of scans could use some extra cores).

Thanks for the suggestion!

[SDH]

This thought came to mind, reading your success story.

There are some OS parts that do or don't get loaded during a clean install of W7 based on the BIOS settings at time of install.

For example, if SATA Emulation in BIOS is set to IDE instead of the Intel/HP strongly recommended setting of RAID + AHCI then critical drivers don't get installed and you'll crash on boot.  Thereafter with this situation if you change BIOS to boot with SATA emulation set to RAID + AHCI (preferred) or AHCI alone you'll get a blue screen crash.  This was essentially unfixable in XP, and MS had a FixIt that used to work for W7.  Then they stopped their FixIt idea.

I'm wondering if BIOS is set to Hyperthreading-disabled before a clean install that will also result in a similar issue.  Perhaps some critical driver does not get installed and then when you later try to enable that in BIOS you end up with an OS crash.

The HP OS install image that comes from the factory would have a master level install that the HP engineers have fine tuned.  You don't get the same with a clean install off the MS install DVD unless you know all the tricks.....