windows protection error

[yellohut]

my brother went to restart his computer and part of the way through booting he gets a BSOD that says:
"Windows protection error. You need to restart your computer. System Halted"

He's running Windows Me, and didn't add any new hard/soft ware recently..

I did a google search and one on MS's site, but it didn't get me anywhere..

[DragonNOA1]

Can you boot to safe mode?

[yellohut]

oh, yeah.. forgot to mention that it can boot into safe mode, and I did a system restore, but it didn't work.

[GaryRouth]

Here's a step-by-step troubleshooter from Microsoft. The first link gives a general explanation of several causes for protection errors. The second link is a Windows Me step-by-step troubleshooter that uses the msconfig utility to help locate the trouble.

General Info on Troubleshooting Protection Errors
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;149962&

Windows ME Troubleshooter (especially see the section for Troubleshooting when able to boot to Safe Mode)
http://support.microsoft.com/default...b;EN-US;273738

Other quick tries:
1) Run a full system antivirus scan (you can do this from Safe Mode, or boot with a bootable antivirus disk)
2) Enter Bios Setup to make sure the settings look OK. Weak CMOS batteries, power surges, etc. can cause a few changes.
3) Boot the system with a MemoryDoc diskette and test the system memory from DOS http://www.simmtester.com

If none of these help (not System Restore, not MS Troubleshooting), and all the hardware checks out OK, one of your options is an over-the-top reinstall. An extra wrinkle with WinMe is that you'll need to disable System Restore just prior to the reinstall, and then re-enable it after (or at least make sure it has the settings you prefer): http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.p...threadid=70846

Those aren't the most fun to troubleshoot (time-consuming), but the culprit usually surfaces eventually
. . . Gary

[yellohut]

sorry it took me so long to get back...
I've tried everything listed above except the doc memory thing.. I'm doing that now..
otherwise it's a no go..
during a scandisk his power supply fried.. I then realized that the fan doesn't spin in it..
I got him a new power supply, but one weird thing is that his motherboard (asus p4te) takes 3 connectors (the regular one, a square one, and a smaller rectangular one) I've seen the first two before, but not the third.. anyways, the new PS has a plug for all three, but the old one only had a main one..
could this be a problem?
It ran fine for a year without anything plugged into the other two.
TIA
-yello

[yellohut]

ok, i ran the memory test and everything passed..
i'm going to try booting from a boot disk and running scanreg to see if it can fix it somehow,..
let me know if you have any other ideas.

[GaryRouth]

One more diagnostic to run: the hard disk diagnostics from the manufacturer of the drive. Since it was a disk utility running when things went bad, you'll want to see if the disk itself was damaged.

Here's a quote from a review of the P4T-E, regarding the power connectors: "The P4T-E also requires the use of the extra power connectors that Intel's P4 solutions require to provide the extra voltage that the CPU needs and also an auxiliary power connector not disimilar to one half of the old split AT power connector." That third connector reminds me of the old Dell power connectors (pre P4 - they also had the standard ATX plus the one "not disimiliar to one half of the old split AT"). . .

If the memory and hard disk are both OK, but some file corruption may be in place, you could try an over-the-top if scandisk doesn't help.

Hope it comes out allright
. . . Gary