*SOLVED* XP BSOD - reinstall or not?

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barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#11650 4-Feb-2007 19:57

trying to fix a PC for someone, and it reboots straight after the scrolling blue bars! safe mode does the same thing.

unfortunately the XP cd I'm trying to install from bluescreens aswell. the above picture is what happens with 'boot with debug mode enabled' selected upon pressing F8 at startup

Ubuntu works perfectly on this PC, and about 8 bytes of RAM are bad which surely shouldn't upset Windows so easily?

How can I install XP when the install disc bluescreens?

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barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#59736 4-Feb-2007 20:04

oh yeah. I forgot to mention, this only started happening after a Windows Update

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bradstewart

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#59750 4-Feb-2007 23:44

How far into the install process does it bluescreen?

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#59754 5-Feb-2007 05:05

brad: when switching from 80x25 text mode into the interactive text-mode, ie just after loading the ide and scsi drivers. installer BSOD says "SESSION3_INITALIZATION_FAILED"

with the flakey RAM module removed it still bluescreens. it's an SiS 745 north-bridge Athlon XP with 266MHz DDR 133MHz FSB.

this is genuine / legitimate XP Pro CD I'm using and the disc works ok on another PC. I'm reluctant to write-off the mobo because Ubuntu works and memtest86 passes, even though the symptoms Windows exhibits point to flakey hardware (I'm not taking a stab at Windows for the record!)

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bradstewart

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#59781 5-Feb-2007 11:05

This sounds like a hardrive issue. The few times I have seen this error it was because of corrupted boot.ini or MBRs.

Does the victim have Norton installed? Norton was the cause of my problem, It deleted some spyware and then wanted to start in safe mode to remove the rest, but when it restarted I got this error. Seems Norton munted the boot file. The install disk wouldn't work. Had to create a DOS boot disk and delete the boot file and run a chkdisk.

barf

643 posts

Ultimate Geek

#59796 5-Feb-2007 14:54

~~yep, it was the filesystem (NTFS)~~ the hard disk's SMART log and self-test checks out OK. the only anti-virus on here is AVG so it may well have been the update that broke it.
thanks, appreciate your help brad. I thought the filesystem was OK because it worked in Ubuntu