Ask CCF: Windows XP System Blue Screens at Bootup?

[The Gorn]

It's my wife's computer, a Dell Vostro 200 running Windows XP.

It blue screens during Windows startup or right after the desktop is displayed. I have witnessed it do this. It will do this from a cold start (off for hours) as well as when warm. It is somewhat intermittent - my wife may have to try five times to start it in order to get it to run.

It doesn't blue screen when running, once it makes it past startup and the first few seconds of the lifetime of Explorer.

The only tinkering I did with it ever was a memory upgrade from 1 to 2 GB, and the blue screens did not start then.

I personally think it's some driver or application that is starting to run at startup.

How can I diagnose this properly?

Thanks, Darkhumour. 

[pxsant]

Does the system have the issue if started in safe mode?

In any case, I would guess the problem is one of the following in this order:

1.  Memory problem and associated crash
2.  Disk errors on read/load of operating system

To test for memory, you could use any of the free memory testers out there including Memtest86+ at http://www.memtest.org/ and Memtest at http://hcidesign.com/.

The best utility disk repair and re-writer utility out there is from a guy named Dmitriy Primochenko at http://www.dposoft.net/.  It is not free but at $59.95 is worth every penny.  I have used it to save a good number of erratic hard drives.

When I think about it more, and based on your symptoms, I would say that is more likely errors on loading the OS.  It could be a flaky region in track 0.  Dmitriy's program rewrites all flaky traks so they will read correctly.

[The Gorn]

You're not DH but thanks anyway. 

I changed the memory a few months ago. The appearance of these problems now is fishy.

Is this guy's software the modern equivalent of Gibson SpinRite? It sounds similar.

[pxsant]

Is this guy's software the modern equivalent of Gibson SpinRite? It sounds similar.

Similar but better.

You can download a demo version which will tell you whether you have errors or not.  To quote Dmitiry's site:

"The main purpose of the unregistered demo version is to display a report which contains information about the possibility to regenerate the entire disk by means of the registered full version. If the first found bad sector has been successfully regenerated, you can buy the product to regenerate all bad sectors on your hard drive. "

Yep DH is the resident expert in these things.  What say DH?

[The Gorn]

Awesome, Pxsant. Thanks very much for the tips.

That guy's site was really easy to find (the SEO for his name is impeccable.  )

[DarkHumour]

I thought Gibson was more sales bravado than actual practical product but that's my bias.  Any product that requires a shrill in-your-face sales pitch must actually suck.

My first guess was this.  Is the memory the exact same brand, timing, and spec ?  My analogy is that you wouldn't mix and match different brands of spark plugs for your car so... 

Hell, my work machine was upgraded by the other technology group and I had weird "plaid screens of death" when I opened a malformed pdf file.  I went "rogue" and checked it out.

NONE of those things were aligned so I swapped memory around with another machine so that everything was consistent (the timing was different! Can they read?) and I haven't had any lockups since. Seems like tech 101 and these guys FAILED but since their company is the 800 pound gorilla...

It is a pain when an OEM sells you the lowest size memory and spans it across all the available memory slots.  If you want to max out the system you have to replace all of them.

Second guess is if you have the small form factor tower that the heat has built up and/or the motherboard has blown caps on them (which doesn't manifest itself except when the computer is 'stressed'). Dell played games with honoring their customer warranties over that problem in the past...allegedly.

Third guess.  The hard drive controller got accidentally switched from "compatible" to AHCI or visa versa in the bios so the operating system doesn't know how to boot the drive (but I think Dell has more specific messages prior to booting so this is an outside guess).

DarkHumour

Bad stick ?

Addendum: When I bought Nameless-Cheapsh*t(tm) brand RAM for an old P3 laptop it refused to boot. I returned those sticks back to the store.  After I bought Crucial brand with the same spec it worked fine.  That was my 'stunt laptop' I took on my trip to Montreal.  I trust Crucial, Corsair, and Kingston 'value' (for now).  Crucial is usually my go-to brand as they have an online choose-your-ram system that I think any customer can follow in the future.

[Richardk]

You said it's been running for some time and this problem is new.

What happens if you boot using a linux live or boot CD? That should shake out whether it's hardware or software as you suspect with a bad driver. That's the first thing I'd do.

[The Gorn]

I think I will do what pxsant said.  To answer one of DH's points, the memory was entirely replaced. There was one stick of 1 GB which I replaced with a stick of 2 GB.

[DarkHumour]

Hmm.  What brand of memory? (And the sticks and pci/agp/pcie cards are all fully seated of course.  Didn't heat wobble its way out yet.).  Some older systems get ornery over unpaired memory...

If you can get into safe mode schedule a full chkdsk    echo y|chkdsk c: /r 

See if that helps could simply be corruption.  (System crashes and non gentle shutdowns accumulate errors).

Also could be a firmware/bios update for that system.  Dell - "Oh by the way the system crashes if you do x. y. z. so here is the fix."

The use some Dells around here.  People shutdown the damn things in the middle of boot up and logoff all the time.  The power supplies also crap out or act oddly until they do.

I've had personal or client systems crash or refuse to boot because a usb stick was attached.

DarkHumour

[The Gorn]

Thanks, DH! You da man, yo.