Boot Failure With Two CD/DVD Drives.

[twopalms]

Hello,

I have a Gateway PC (2.0 GHz) that has started to have intermittent boot failures (IRQL_NOT_LESS-OR-EQUAL, with Stop 0x0A). Everything works fine if I can boot, but booting is becoming increasingly rare.

This failure occurs only when I have two CD/DVD drives connected, but not when I have just one connected. The boot failures occur consistently regardless of which 2 CD/DVD drives I have connected (I have 3 to choose from: DVD-RW, DVD-ROM, and CD-RW). Also, no boot failure occurs with only one CD/DVD drive connected.

I have been connecting the CD/DVD drives as master/slave on my secondary IDE channel. This is how the PC arrived, and worked fine for two years.

Any suggestions would be much appreciated.

Thanks!

[bailey]

I belive that error is usally due to a bad stick of ram

[glc]

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=165863

Is EZ CD Creator installed?

[twopalms]

Thanks for both suggestions, glc and bailey. Both are much appreciated.

I have tested my RAM thoroughly using memtest and another similar tool supplied by microsoft. No problems found. I thoroughly checked the hard drive, too. I have seen the problem when booting from three separate hard drives, so the hard drive is an unlikely cause.

I do have the latest version (7) of Roxio Easy Media Creator installed, but I don't think that is the problem because:
1) The stop error message I receive does not match the one specified in the Microsoft web page referenced.
2) The problem occurred with Roxio Easy CD Creator 5 as well as the newer version 7. I tend to think that Roxio would have figured this problem out after two new major releases. Maybe that is wishful thinking, but I still don't see the same error message as the one mentioned by Microsoft.

Thanks again for any additional thoughts on this vexing problem.

[twopalms]

I finally solved this really vexing problem (intermittent BSOD at boot, with error IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, Stop 0A) by uninstalling the Intel Application Accelerator.

After much trail and error and anguish, I traced the problem to the drivers for my IDE channels. From Device Manager, I rolled back the driver for my secondary IDE Channel and this solved the problem, but my DVD burner was painfully slow. The driver I rolled back, it turns out, was Intel's IdeChnDr.sys., installed with the Intel Application Accelerator (latest available version).

I resolved the problem completely and restored my DVD performance by completely uninstalling the Intel Application Accelerator. This reverted back to the Micrsoft Windows XP ATA drivers (atapi.sys and storprop.dll) rather than Intel's IdeChnDr.sys. Imagine that -- Microsoft software coming to the rescue.

This solved my problem. Hope it helps someone else.