Help! Blue Screen of Death Just Kicked Me in the Face (XP)

S

Shandrakor

New Member
Howdy. Normally, I can troubleshoot my PC problems myself...okay, my 'solution' is to reformat my hard drive, which usually fixes the problem. :P

However, starting about a week ago I've been getting Blue Screens of Death seemingly at random. I didn't change any of my settings or software, so I figured 'Hey -- time to reformat'. So 4 days ago I reformatted & reinstalled XP.

Everything was going fine, then -- BAM! Blue Screen of Death. Exception caused by unknown device driver. Most peculiar, methinks. So I reformatted and reinstalled again; things are fine for a few hours, then the BSoD rears it's ugly head. The really annoying thing is that ever since the first few incidences, the computer restarts itself before I have a chance to read the BSoD text.

This stinks. So, I activate Windows Update. My PC downloads and begins installing SP2, when suddenly the BSoD appears. Now, after it restarts, Windows won't load. I think "Hmm.... It appears to have selected a really bad time to decide to stop things". My guess was that it's stuck somewhere with a half-updated file, and I don't feel like fiddling with it. So I reformat.

At this point, I've reformatted 3 times in 4 days. And the BSoD appears again. Rage!

Whatever is wrong appears to also be randomly causing things to shut down. Firefox shuts down regularly (and refused to start for awhile), and sometimes after a shut-down-and-restart cycle (PC-initiated, probably involving a BSoD) doesn't provide any data as to what went wrong, usually forgetting to mention that it's just recovered from a serious error.

At this point, I was under the impression that it wasn't a software problem. And then I get this...

http://oca.microsoft.com/en/respons...f2e0b2ae&SID=10

Now, for about the past month my PC's been saying my ethernet connection is unplugged, when I'm well aware that nothing of the sort is eventuating.

When I try to install games they fail to complete installation, usually blaming a corrupt cab file.

I'm utterly failing to find the Device Manager...and I don't know if that will help. What information about my computer do you need to know?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Shandrakor

EDIT: Oh, and now my system is convinced I have not just one, but two 3.5" floppy drives. Which I don't; my only removable media drive is a CD/DVD ROM.
 
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sounds like a memory problem to me.... they tend to come on and show them selves in this manner.
I would try using only one of your sticks of ram at any time to find out whivh one is causing the problem. If you only have one stick available then you need to get hold of another stick to try.

The problem with more than one floppy drive showing up is having the option in your bios... you need to look for the section that shows what floppy disks you have and then select none for the second one
 
This is very similar to my current problem. I get BSOD at random. I have not reformatted yet as I beleive it to be a hardware problem. The post about your memory is a good one and should not be overlooked. Mine is pointing to a corrup HD. If I can get the computer to settle down long enough to do a chkdsk /r then I am fine for a while. A day or possibly a week. I am going to swap HD and see if I can clear the error. Your problem may be similar however with numerous formats and reloads one would think that the drive should be OK. Worth some thought.
 
Thanks for the suggestions, y'all. I've run Chkdsk on both my HDDs; both are clean.

Hairy_Lee said:
sounds like a memory problem to me.... they tend to come on and show them selves in this manner.
I would try using only one of your sticks of ram at any time to find out whivh one is causing the problem. If you only have one stick available then you need to get hold of another stick to try.
Click to expand...

I'm starting to suspect you're right. My BSoDs seem to come at random -- is there any way to force the problem to occur? Possibly some program that will perform a massive quantity of operations/second?

Hairy_Lee said:
The problem with more than one floppy drive showing up is having the option in your bios... you need to look for the section that shows what floppy disks you have and then select none for the second one
Click to expand...

The weird thing is that I had 0 floppys until yesterday -- then 2 appeared. I'll check the BIOS.

Christian Darrall said:
do you have any removeable devices e.g. flash disk, mp3 player etc.
Click to expand...
Not that I've bothered installing lately. ;)

Sometimes the BSoD happens once/day...sometimes more often. Thanks again for all your help lads.

I need to find some way to 'force' the BSoD event to trigger...will many operations/second do this, or is there another way?

Shandrakor
 
i had these, when this happens, try to instantly hold the shut down butoon, might make it stay there.
 
memtest86 is the way to go for memory errors.
There's a version of memtest that works in the windows environment too.
 
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