I've been banging my head against the wall on this one, and have seem to made my problem worse... So, heres what happened..
turned off pc at night before going to bed, woke up next morning to see the lights on keyboard on and power light still on, everything was non responsive, so i powered it off, and it went off. Turned back on, BSOD.
after extensive testing, i have come to conclude that its NOT hardware fault with PC, Possibly the HD itself, but thats where it gets wierd. When booted into normal windows, it would crash within 30-60 seconds, if booted into safe mode, it would not crash as all. So i assume it was a corrupt file or maybe corrupt profile (only have the one profile) so i threw in the win XP home cd and did a repair to windows. That all installed fine, and when the pc went to re-boot to start window, it BSOD'd me. Now i can not start the pc in normal windows or safe mode.
I put the hard drive in my 2nd pc, and it BSOD's me everytime. Currently its still in this pc, so if there are any key debug files that you'd like to see, i;d be happy to retireve them for you.
As the name implies, this error is usually caused by improper or corrupt drivers.
However, heat can cause this problem. As a first quick measure, ensure your CPU fan/heatsink assembly and power supply fan/vents are clean of dust and running well.
Try updating your network interface drivers (NIC) as this is a common cause for this error.
Use the appropriate downloaded file to create either a floppy bootdisk or a bootable CD.
For a floppy, unzip the files to an empty directory and (with a floppy in your drive) run the install.bat file. When complete, you won't see any files on the floppy/CD, but they are there. Just boot the machine with this floppy/CD and run it as long as you can afford to. If there are errors, run it on one memory module at a time to narrow down the possibilities. (ie; Remove all but one module.) You may have to set your bios boot device sequence to boot from the floppy (or CDROM) drive first.
Another possibility is an outdated bios. However, all other possibilities should be tried before a bios flash.
Start with these suggestions and post back with your results.
If this was a Hardware issue on PC, wouldnt putting the HD into another machine eliminate PC over heating, Bad RAM, Bad Network driver (interesting though, when i was able to get into safemode, the ethernet drivers were incorrect, however i was able to change them back to what they should be. Windows for some reason had the network adapter for a wireless laptop card, and also there was another driver called Wan Miniport(IPX) with a yellow exclamation mark), Bad PSU and other such things?
Is there any form of scandisk available in XP home, or is this a MS-DOS bootup feature that i gotta make a bootable CD for?
"When booted into normal windows, it would crash within 30-60 seconds, if booted into safe mode, it would not crash as all."
This is what lead me to suspect driver problems. Safe Mode loads bare-bones minimal drivers, just enough to get the O/S to run. If you try Safe Mode with Networking, and it crashes, that points to network (driver) problems.
However, with the drive crashing all the time in the other machine, a disk test is warranted.
Re: Scandisk. In XP it's chkdsk. See attached photo.
I ran Scan disk and it found 0 errors on drive. I think I may have been a little unclear in my ramblings about safe mode...
When everything first started, Safe mode would work flawlessly with networkm i was able to go on the net, anywhere was fine, Safe mode would not crash. I uninstalled Network Magic thing it was a possible cause, but it wasnt. So getting frustrated i decided, hey, i will run the repair with the XP Home cd and just let windows re-install itself overtop. That worked fine, until it BSOD'd me on reboot of install. From that point on, Safe mode was a no-go.
In the meantime however, I have made things a lot worse , i was trying to do a second re-install when the drive was a slave and caused the other machine to crash (unable to load hal.dll) and upon trying to repair that fault i really screw it up, but there wasnt anything of much importance on that machine so it doing a clean format at the moment, and re-install. I am down to 2 of 4 PC's now So once i get other machine back up and running i will try to look at that drive again. Would you like a dump file or 2 to look at? I tried looking at it, but it makes no sense to me.
Ok, unfortunately, have lost the dump, as i ended up formatting that drive
I have done all that i can do, so i just backed everything up to this machines hard drive and will install XP Pro and go from there. I appreciate all your help and will continue to stop by here to check things out, even I might be able to help someone else out, maybe not in computers, but if you got an RF problem, come my way
Ok, Thought my problem was solved, as I was installing winXP pro, it was doing its usual Hard drive format, however... Once it completed its format, I am still getting my STOP:0xD1... DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error... does this mean that i have a bad MBR or just a bad hard drive in general?
Little help here, I downloaded the Hitachi Drive test, and make the bootable floppy, but the floppy doesnt boot, and when i look at disk, its only file folders, no files in root, hence why it wont boot, so i dont think this is gonna help me run a test on my hard drive
, i was trying to do a second re-install when the drive was a slave and caused the other machine to crash (unable to load hal.dll) and upon trying to repair that fault i really screw it up, but there wasnt anything of much importance on that machine so it doing a clean format at the moment, and re-install. I am down to 2 of 4 PC's now 