If you migrate Windows installations between storage adapters, you’re often left with the well known STOP 0x7B INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

This happens because Windows doesn’t yet have the required drivers installed, and/or set as boot-critical.

The dism.exe tool allows us to install (boot-critical) drivers into an offline Windows “image”. Note that an offline Windows “image” is nothing special – a regular Windows install is a valid Windows “image”.

After a STOP 0x7B, Windows Boot Manager usually sets up fallback boot into WinRE (Windows Recovery Environment). WinRE has a copy of the DISM tool, so you’re good to go. (Cancel the Startup Recovery assistant if you have to.)

Example DISM command to use from the WinRE (or WinPE) Command Prompt:

dism /image:d:\ /add-driver /driver:e:\ /recurse

So lets say you want to open a new PuTTY session to a certain IP Address and have it automatically enter your username for you.

C:\putty.exe username@192.168.0.1

Now lets do the same thing but with a password too.

C:\putty.exe username@192.168.0.1 -pw password

The two above are fine if you don’t need to use any of the provided settings you get from within PuTTY (e.g. Tunnels, Proxy’s, Color Schemes etc) but if you’re like me and you need to use Tunnels to tunnel into a server using a number of ports then the simplest way to do is this to create a new PuTTY session and then use the following parameters.

C:\putty.exe -load “Session Name” -l username -pw password