help appreciated: blue screen of death query

toady

I tried emailing microsoft support, but their solution was to suggest link to a tech forum where the problem isn't even listed. does anyone have any suggestions?


MY daughter's Dell Inspiron pc has crashed following the most recent Windows update, and fails to boot. She is running XP; the pc itself is less than 3 years old.
upon booting up, she gets an error message on blue screen which says "a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.if this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. if this screen appears again, follow these steps
disable or uninstall any anti virus disk defragmentation or backup utilities; check your hard drive configuration and check for any updates drivers. run CHKDSK/F to check for hard drive corruption and then restart your computer.
technical information:
***STOP:0x00000024 (0x00190203,0x82D70CA0, 0xC0000102,0x00000000)"
end of blue screen error message.


when trying to follow instructions, she turns off, restarts, but the pc will not boot into safe mode, safe mode with commands, or start windows normally; all of these options lead back to the blue screen error message listed above.
the pc came with xp installed so she does not have any xp programme disks. I would be grateful for help as her hard drive contains vital college work, not to mention photos etc.
many thanks. I suspect it's hopeless,but she can't afford a new laptop just now.

TiTheRev

Here's a list of BIOS startup keys depending on manufacturer and model, which may help you get into the right screen at start up, HTH

http://www.cpucare.com/how-to-faqs/Hardware/BIOS/Access_BIOS.htm

asininity

Has she backed up her stuff recently?

toady

no recent backups, no..


off to look at the link, thanks.

asininity

What you need to do is figure out if its hardware or software, I personally think its software. The best thing you could do is re-install windows but obviously you'll lose any stuff not backed up.

You could try a boot disk and if that works it means its windows thats messed up. Or you can try putting in the recovery disk you got with the computer and attempting a recovery.

timestar

When you say this started after installing the latest Windows update - was it Service Pack 3 you were trying to install?

toady

I think it was service pack 3, she had automatic updates switched on and I think that was the last one installed last week?

I'm inclined to think it is a software problem too but I'm at a loss at how to break the cycle, so to speak of constantly getting the blue screen each time I log on. if I could just get to controi panel I could run system restore for her, but I can't do it. I tried the BIOS code on that link, but unfortunately no joy there. she'd like to save her photos and college work- if I took it into a pc repair shop (we have a good one run locally), could they salvage the things saved on the hard drive before I attempted a reinstall?

timestar

If it was SP3 then it could be all sorts of things as even Microsoft admit there are a lot of possible issues and their advice before installing it is now very long. I'm pretty sure that Dell will have put a copy of XP in a partition on the hard drive so not having XP on disk may not be an issue - if you need to re-install. But, I'm kind out of my techie expertise here so you will need to wait for the real experts on here for better help - best of luck with it!

Googled your error message and they suggest it is caused by a Registry issue.

asininity

If you have no windows disk there could be a recovery partition. Attempt a recovery using it, you have to figure out the key to press during boot, for my acer laptop it was F10 I don't know about Dells. If it doesn't work theres two options one is re-install and loose everything the other is either a Boot CD of a Linux LiveCD, I find linux easier.

If you can get into the BIOS and change the boot order so it tries to boot from the CDROM before the hard drive you can boot up a linux distro like Ubuntu. It wont touch the hard drive ie install but you should be able to browser the hard drive and move the photos onto a pen drive then do a re-install.

toady

just wanted to say thanks very much for replies. daughter was rushed to hsopital last monday night and things have been all over the place since then. I've tried booting as suggested but the screen of death seems insurmountable. i will take it to a shop to see if they can rescue the HD data,which would help. many thanks!

vyseyboy

Bear in mind a shop will probably charge an awful lot for data recovery.

You can remove the hard disc cover (usually on the bottom of the laptop) carefully with a small screwdriver, and use something like this or this to plug the hard drive into another computer, making it show up with a drive letter as if it was a big USB flash drive. Then copy across files as necessary.

One of the links above comes with a power supply, the other doesn't. The power supply isn't necessary for 2.5 inch laptop drives, but is for 3.5 inch desktop drives.