Dreaded BSOD! Help please!

madmum33

nickcardwell wrote: »

wouldnt do any harm as well do run a chkdsk on the hard drive. have seen many bsod fixed by running chkdsk!

start >run>cmd
type cmd
type in chkdsk c: /f/v/r
it will prompt saying it can not lock the hard drive but to run on startup
type y
exit out
reboot the pc
note it may take ages (up to 1/2hr to get into windows)

Did that It all seems to be working at the moment, but who knows how long that will last?

I updated my graphics card driver, now the fonts and desktop icons are huge and I can't find out how to make them small again! Set the resolution to the correct one for this monitor and still looks weird. Seriously sick of computers!!!!! :mad:

madmum33

Fixed the resolution/icon size.

Miró

Hello madmum33

Reading your thread avidly cos I got a similar problem .......:mad:

madmum33

Everything was looking so much better last night, but this morning I got the BSOD again

The full error was:
BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO
0x000000074 (0x000000003, 0x000000002, 0x80087000, 0xc000014c)

I'm starting to think this might be viral or something.

wakandem

Good to hear you are back up. I am still thinking hard drive issue and checking that is where I would be going next, either by putting in a drive I know that works or putting the drive in another machine and running checks on it, or seeing if it fails on that system.
definately run the chkdisk metioned above & see if it fails.

as hard drives have moving parts they will fail & generally a drive that is working after 5 yrs is living on borrowed time.
If you checked the ram and the seating of the cards/ram/cables as from an earlier post it does point to hard drive. It comes to a point of trial and error.

you could boot up on a linux live cd which doesn't read/write to the hard drive and see if you get the same problem. If it good you can assume the motherboard and ram are good. It may then be a virus, but i'm sure there would be other clues or the hard drive
https://www.ubuntu.com

pww2004

If you wish to simply clone the system to a new hard drive and if either of them are seagate/maxtor then you can use discwizard available from the seagate website for free.

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US&name=DiscWizard&vgnextoid=d9fd4a3cdde5c010VgnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD

I used this a couple of months ago and it took about an hour.

Pete

madmum33

wakandem, I'm running chkdsk with the fix option now and it has found an error in index $SDH for file 9, now correcting.

I also spoke to a friend who is more savvy than me, he thinks it could be RAM. Still hoping to get it working properly - it seems pretty stable once it's running, just dodgy at startup!

One thing I know for sure............... I hate laptops!!!! Having to use my sons at the moment

wakandem

Hopefully the chkdisk will sort it. If it finds loads more errors or if it hangs at a certain point for a long time then i rekon it is the drive.
As for the ram, see if you can get a stick of the same spec and try that. Have you tried running on one stick? unlikely both stick will be faulty if it is the ram

nickcardwell

if you think its memory download memtest (do a google its free)

you burn to a cd rom, and boot up from the cd, it will scan your memory for any faults (its writes to memory and then reads the memory if they dont match it will flag up (ie faulty)

madmum33

I've been doing quite alot of experimenting since I last posted!

I discovered the memory in my kids pc was the same spec so I tried swapping the two 256mb sticks from my pc into their pc and their one 512mb stick into mine. My pc still crashed, their pc booted normally. Suggests it isn't memory.

I had a new crash yesterday when I tried to do something a bit more advanced than surfing and emailing. I tried to open a folder of photos on the hard drive and got the BSOD with this error message:

NO_PAGES_AVAILABLE

STOP: 0X0000004D (0X0001ADF6, 0X0001ADF6, 0X00006FEB, 0X00000000)

This morning, opening folders of photos stored on my external hard drive didn't crash the system.

The startup goes smoothly once the unit has been running for 10 minutes or so (on blue screen usually)

If it is the hard drive, I might have a problem. I can't find the Windows XP disc (if I ever had it!) :mad: