[Neen21]

My fiancee' and I have 2 PC's that are down in our home. Both taken by the blue screen of death. My PC unfortunately will not reboot at all now. Just sits on a black screen. His however will and I was able to disable the auto restart and snap a few shots. I was just wondering If I could get some input. We seem to be getting more than 1 different BSOD message. He swapped out RAM which gave us one message then put the old RAM back in and now we get a whole new message. Either way I am not having any luck figuring out why this is all happening and thought it would be best to try and see if I could fix it myself before paying The Geek Squad or buying a whole new PC. We dont really use our PC's for much other then web email, surfing and World of Warcraft. We are still able to boot up in safe mode but that is about it. We have also done a complete system recovery on the machine with no luck and replaced the hard drive.

Specs on his machine are:
Emachines
200GB Hard Drive
2GB RAM
Intel Pentium D, Dual Core
ATI radeon xpress 200 (original) Graphics card was upgraded when the PC was 1st purchased. (2 years ago)

Before the issues occured we had not upgraded any hardware or software in either PC in well over a year. They both just crashed with the BSOD on different occasions, mine was while playing WoW.

I'm attaching pics of the screens. Any help is very much appreciated.

[Neen21]

No one can tell me what the blue screen means? :-(

[TekTime]

You did a system recovery - from within Windows? If so, it's possible that the problem (if it is a configuration problem) was present in your recovery file thus the problem still occurring afterward. Your Windows configuration is most likely the culprit and it's possible that it may not be possible to fix without the "repair" function. Have you tried using the XP disk and using the "repair" option?

What errors are you getting on which computers? That information is needed in order to troubleshoot effectively.
We have to rule out virus/spyware first, then the possibility of bad memory, power supply, etc exists. More info is needed on what you are experiencing and on WHICH computers.

[Neen21]

We did a system recovery, which was offered as an option after the very first crash so I assume it was thru windows. After that did not work, he used the reboot cd that came with the computer. The two pics I posted were from the same PC. My post is only about 1 PC, the Emachines. My PC won't even boot up at all so I was not able to get the shot of the BSOD. I have a Vista CD which I was thinking of trying, his PC is compatable for the upgrade, which he had done but when the PC crashed he went back to XP because that was the original OS the PC came with. I was thinking of getting brand new RAM to see if that fixed that problem. The PC has been running all day in safe mode so I'm not sure the power supply would be the problem. As far as viruses, the hard drive is new as well, that was the 1st thing we replaced when it crashed so there should not be any viruses, at least I dont think?

[TekTime]

You mentioned the hard drive was "replaced"... what steps did that consist of?

Was any "old" data backed up and copied to the drive?

Was the former drive cloned or imaged to the new drive...etc?

<p><i>Posted via Mobile Device</i></p>

[Neen21]

No, since we figured everything was lost we started fresh with the new hard drive. He downloaded all the drivers tho that are needed to make the graphics card work but that was about it. And then he installed the XP OS on the new hard drive, but that was all.

[Neen21]

You think I should pop in that vista OS CD i have and see if that fixes it? Try and start from fresh again?

[TekTime]

did you experience the same blue screen errors before the drive was changed?

I am wondering if the drivers that were installed are causing issues, since the PC doesn't crash in safe mode.

I don't think installing Vista would fix the problem. Were there any errors during the Windows install?

Have you checked the device manager to see if there are any driver issues or yellow exclamation marks on the hardware?
Posted via Mobile Device

[Neen21]

We did not catch the BSOD error messages before the new hard drive was installed because we did not disable auto restart. I looked in the event log and there are yellow exclamation marks. Here are the 3 I found, the print one is weird considering we don't have a printer hooked up to the PC.


Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Print
Event Category: None
Event ID: 20
Date: 9/13/2009
Time: 7:59:01 AM
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: ALEX
Description:
Printer Driver Microsoft XPS Document Writer for Windows NT x86 Version-3 was added or updated. Files:- mxdwdrv.dll, unidrvui.dll, mxdwdui.gpd, unidrv.hlp, mxdwdui.dll, mxdwdui.ini, stddtype.gdl, stdnames.gpd, stdschem.gdl, stdschmx.gdl, unidrv.dll, unires.dll, XpsSvcs.dll.
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.




Event Type: Warning
Event Source: USER32
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1073
Date: 9/13/2009
Time: 8:15:50 PM
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: ALEX
Description:
The attempt to reboot ALEX failed
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Data:
0000: 00 00 00 00 ....





Event Type: Warning
Event Source: W32Time
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10
Date: 9/16/2009
Time: 1:30:16 PM
User: N/A
Computer: ALEX
Description:
The time provider 'NtpClient' returned an error when asked for time samples. The error will be ignored. The error was: The handle is invalid. (0x80070006)
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.


then there are TONS of red errors that say this:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: DCOM
Event Category: None
Event ID: 10005
Date: 9/15/2009
Time: 7:07:28 PM
User: ALEX\Administrator
Computer: ALEX
Description:
DCOM got error "This service cannot be started in Safe Mode " attempting to start the service LiveUpdate with arguments "" in order to run the server:
{03E0E6C2-363B-11D3-B536-00902771A435}
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[TekTime]

Something could have went wrong during the installation process.
Are the hard drive cables in good condition and connected properly?

Do you know if there were any error messages during XP installation?

Those are some strange error messages. The yellow exclamation marks that you noticed were in the event log and not in the device manager?
Posted via Mobile Device

[Neen21]

problem solved, looks like it was a combo of driver and RAM that was causing the issue.

THANK YOU so much for your help!

You definitely helped us narrow it down! We are going to check into the same issues on the other PC.

[TekTime]

You're welcome! I'm glad you were able to figure out the culprit!!

Posted via Mobile Device