Blue Screen of Death

[clevelandst124]

Okay, so it turns out I'm not very smart. Right here is what I got so far.

I thought McAffee was impenitrable. I use to go to vgchartz.org because I like to play video games. Usually a virus message popped up. So thought whatever my software seems to be catching it. Well, that was a bad idea. Spy Sherriff got through. It created an admin account and locked out McAffee.

I noticed I had problems and I thought maybe I can restart and it will be okay. That was dumb. It installed a program when I shut down that essentially tied down my computer. As such, I was deleting things and I got McAffee to somehow run one time. Things looked like they were getting better. I thought, okay, I'll work on it later. I shut down and a program starting installing (must not have got all of the virus.) So me being smart, deciding to do a hard shut down and not let whatever was going on install itself.

So, now that hard drive just goes to the blue screen of death on start up. I have important files on the harddrive, so my thinking is that I would install a different HD, get that up and running then plug in the old HD I have. Grab the files I need. And then dump the old hard drive. Get both up and running on my system. Seemed like a good plan to me.

I went with the Manufacterers HD because I wanted to save money over retail. I physically installed the new hard drive. I put in windows xp. It started set up and then blue screen of death. I've check Bios, it notices my new hard drive. I ran Hard drive diagnostics within my computer, it says the hard drive is fine. I tried the Ultimate Boot CD thinking maybe I need to get the hard drive into partitions. I have a WD 500 Cavalier. So I tried Data Lifeguard tools on the Ultimate Boot CD and it wouldn't load. So I'm kind of back at square one. Any help?

[pam123]

Hi Clevelanst124,

Please post your full specs.
Did you remember to put the optical drive first in the boot order?

[clevelandst124]

Full System Specs:

Pentium D 3 GHZ
1 Gig 667 DDR RAM
Old HD 160 Gig Seagate SATA
New HD 500 Gig WD SATA
Motherboard, not entirely sure, it's a 2 year old dell
I have a 16x DVD ROM and a 8x DVD-R attached to the system. It seems to want to grab the 16x for startup.
I'm trying to boot from an XP Proffessional disc.

I did put the CD Rom first in the boot sequence. However, it gives me an error message that it can't find the disc. Then I press F1 and Windows Set up begins. It goes through loading items into RAM and then it says starting set-up. At this point it goes to the blue screen of death and lists Stop: 0.0000007e. I can list all the information it leaves at the blue screen if it helps.

[pam123]

It's sounding like you have a hardware problem so the information on the blue screen will help.
Your drive's inability to find the disk is not a good sign.

[clevelandst124]

The drive message is floppy diskette not found. However, I don't have a floppy drive so I removed that in the bios. Then I push F1 and it finds the Windows XP cd. The technical error message is

Stop: 0.0000007E(0xC0000005, 0xF786B0BF, 0xF7CB7208, 0xF7CB6F08)

pci.sys.address F786B0BF base at F7864000 Datestamp 3b7d855c

It goes to the blue screen right when windows says starting windows.

Hardware problem, do you think that my harddrive or another component of my computer has failed or do you think I have bios incorrectly configured?

[syxguns]

Hardware problem, do you think that my harddrive or another component of my computer has failed or do you think I have bios incorrectly configured?

The reason you can not get the SATA drive to work is because you do not have the SATA drivers on the HDD. You will have to use a floppy to get it to work. A floppy only cost around 10 bucks at Frys.

Now if you want to get the other HDD going there are steps to take to correct the BSOD. There are certain things that we need to be sure of. I had another friend that had the BSOD problem and it ended up being one of his memory modules on the motherboard that was causing the problem. But in your case it could be a hardware or software issue. Put the other HDD back on and let us know what the BSOD says.

You can always do it the way that you are if you want. But you will need to get a floppy drive to get the drivers for the SATA drive to work. Just because your BIOS sees the drive does not mean that the XP CD is going to see the drive.

I'm attaching a copy of PC Stats guide to BSOD. This guide may walk you through the process of correcting the BSOD on the other drive. From what you said in the original post I think that it is a software error. Here is the guide: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=1647

Let us know if there is any other help that you need. Good luck!

[pam123]

Back up a sec.
Do you have a Dell Restore disk?
Dell is notorious not leaving well enough alone and you may need something on that disk.

[clevelandst124]

I'm going to check back to my rents and see if I can find my Dell Restore Disk. I hope I have one, the laptop I bought for my wife a year after my PC did not have a restore disk but loaded it all from a spot on the harddrive.

I have an XP Proffessional CD, my PC came with just normal XP I believe. I didn't bother updating XP to Professional, although I don't have professional working on another computer at this time. My old HD runs into stop : 0.0000024 message when I try to boot using last usable configuration. I didn't know if it would work, but I tried seeing if I could run a system restore with the XP Proffessional disk on the old HD. It was loading XP, it said it was going to start windows and it gave me the exact same error message that I received on my prior HD. Hope I didn't delete any of my files on the HD by trying that. It leads me believe that I have a seperate hardware failure that I'll have to find.

[glc]

Press Ctrl+F11 on bootup and do a system restore from the recovery partition. It WILL wipe your data.

[clevelandst124]

I don't think that I want to wipe my data quite yet. I was able to find my dell info. I found a utility CD and an XP w/ SP2 CD. As such, I was able to finally get my 500 gig up and running with a clean version of XP. I read somewhere online that with my graphics card (Nvidia 6800) you needed to have XP SP2 on install. That may have been the reason for my repeated bsod upon start up with my old version of XP PRO.

Now, my goal was that I wanted to add the second hard drive. When I add it in the bios, it shows up as generic harddrive within the bios. When it was by itself it noticed that it was the 160 gig Seagate harddrive. How do I make it visible to my new computer to grab the information off? Or should I just try the restore repair now that I have the XP SP2 CD? I'm just worried that doing that will clear some of my data. But from researching online, it looks as if the NTSF.sys file is corrupt, and that doing a restore repair is my only option, without wiping, to get back in.

But it was nice to see my computer run something other than BIOS for a change :)

[glc]

What does Disk Management say about the second drive?

You won't be able to run the Ctrl+F11 restore from the new drive. The old drive has 3 partitions - a small diagnostic partition, the main partition, and a hidden recovery partition. Ctrl+F11 restores an image of the system as delivered from the recovery partition.

[clevelandst124]

Disk management says the new drive does not exist. Maybe something is wrong with the sata cable I purchased to connect my hd to my computer. Because, I just have the drive connected through my standard connection, bios seems to understand what it is and I get the .00000024 Stop. Which, like I alluded to, seems to indicate that my NTSF.sys file on the old harddrive has been corrupted. So I think my two options are, figure out how to repair windows on the old system or figure out how to get my computer to see both at this point.

On another topic, would it be worthwhile to clone my old harddrive to my new one and then do a restore, so my 500 gig thinks it is my original dell? There does not appear to be an actual "recovery disk" other than the disk partition mentioned above.

[glc]

Check your bios settings - I seem to remember Dells can't see a second SATA drive till it's specifically enabled in the bios.

[clevelandst124]

Okay, I'm an idiot but I'm working through this and I think I'm close. I had plugged the sata cable in the wrong sata slot :). So I was enabling drive 2 but I was hooked to drive 3. I placed the SATA on drive 2, enabled and started up windows with my clean copy. Instead of booting into Windows immediately, it went to this error screen. It claimed my second hard drive needed a consistency check. It gave me a whole 5 seconds to think about it before automatically starting the consistency check. This took a while. But after my previous experience with interupting Windows, I let it go through it's steps. So it finished and I now see the drive in windows and scanned through it really quick.

So here is my next dumb question. It appears as if the consistency check left my drive intact. There are 143 gigs used out of 148 gigs available. I don't remember the exact amount I had but I constantly had to delete things to install more, so this is about right. My dumb question is where is the information that used to be on my desktop, documents and folders. This is where most of my information is and I didn't really want to snoop around and give the virus a chance to jump to my clean drive. This is also why I didn't want to do a windows search, but I can if necessary.

Also, I don't know how much I trust it now, but I do have McAffey on my new drive. Only thing I've installed. This virus pretty much whipped it last time, is it wise to try a scan on the drive now?

[pam123]

Actually "Desktop" is a folder as is "My Documents".
The question now is, how did you have them organized?
Music and pictures and word .Doc files or .rtf that you recognize are probably all good.
If it's .exe they you'd better know what it is first, in fact any file/folder you don't recognize stays where it is while you do a check or, if it seems warranted, a google.

[glc]

I'd uninstall McAfee and install AVG, then scan the old drive. If there's 143 gigs on it, it will take several hours.

[clevelandst124]

Thanks for the help. I think I am back to where I wanted to be with a fully operational system and access to my old information. One last question kind of off topic. I think this will be my first computer that I actually upgrade versus fully replace. With my D processor, I think I would be able to upgrade to either the Q6600 quad core or the E6700 duo core processors. And for graphics card, I was looking at either the 8800gts or 8800gtx depending on price when I upgrade. I currently have the 6800 which is 16x pci-e so I think I should be fine. Let me know if you think these would be any compatibility issues.

[glc]

Dell? I doubt the motherboard will accept a C2D or C2Q and the power supply will not be strong enough for an 8800. 667 ram is not really fast enough. If you want an upgradeable computer, you build it, you don't buy a Dell or any other major brand prebuilt.

[clevelandst124]

It has a 500 watt Dell powersupply. I figured that would be enough for an 8800 GTS or maybe even the 7950. Both seem like significant jumps over the 6800 I have. As far as the motherboard, I think I have the D- 830 which means its an LGA-775. I thought that would at least accept a core duo processor? The setup I have is out of an XPS which is more upgradable friendly than most of Dell's computer line. Either way, it's just a thought. Looking around I could probably build a computer that would kill mine for $800 or $900 so if I can't upgrade this will make a nice second computer.

[Gen.Ben]

Are you sure it is 500 watts? That sounds like overkill for a dell system stock PSU, then again, it is a XPS and it has a Pentium D :P

You may be able to plop a Core 2 Duo in there, look on your motherboard for a model number, then google what it can support.

LGA775 is the psychical socket design of the processor and motherboard socket. A Core 2 Duo, or a Core 2 Quad would be able to psychically fit in, but the chipset on the motherboard may be a little old and not be able to support the processors.

[glc]

XPS is a different story - they have strong power supplies for strong video cards.

I still doubt that it's C2D or C2Q compatible. What is the *exact* XPS model - even better, what's your service tag number?