Hope that my summary (days of experiments) helps someone:
- My Win7 survived its third transplantation: Intel X99 → AMD X470 → AMD X570 → AMD TRX40. May be tricky, but surely doable.
- 7B BSOD can be annoyingly misleading. In my case it was due to old incompatible drivers that still lingered on my system from previous hardware. Getting rid of unused Intel and older AMD RAID drivers from HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\CriticalDeviceDatabase resolved the BSOD and the system booted happily.
- Switching testsigning on (‘bcdedit /set testsigning on’) works quite differently compared to the boot menu option Disable driver signature enforcement. Testsigning allows you to use third party device drivers with any signature, but won’t tolerate any integral Windows drivers (e.g. ACPI.SYS) with signatures Windows does not trust (more on this in the next point). The only way to avoid error 0xc0000428 on boot is to select Disable driver signature enforcement in the boot menu (you can enable this menu using ‘bcdedit /set {globalsettings} advancedoptions true’ command. Setting testsigning alone has no effect.
- Not knowing Microsoft still messes with Windows 7 certificates I updated (actually messed up!) my system using Simplix UpdatePack7R2-24.5.15.exe, and now the modded ACPI.SYS is flagged as corrupt (error 0xc0000428) unless I use Disable driver signature enforcement which is really, really annoying as now on every boot I need to manually select this option. To make matters even worse, having advanced boot options enabled makes the dreaded Repair your computer option the default! So on every boot I need to carefully evade this death sentence option! Yuck!
- Reverting to older versions of ntoskrnl.exe, winload.efi and winload.exe makes no effect. The certificates are stored somewhere else.
Where I am now and what I need:
- A way to revert to the old Microsoft certificates, where modded ACPI.SYS is trusted. Anyone have any clue? These certificates must be stored somewhere?