Blue Screen of death?

[wrench spinner]

Is the blue screen generally a hardware or software error? My laptop went down last night with this and I havent been able to restart it I keep getting Windows upon startup asking me to Start With the Windows XP CD, I didnt have The CD at home so I grabbed one from the office today. It just seemed real sudden and I Havent installed any new software so I am starting to think hardware? It is 5 years old but worked great up until now so i really dont NEED to go out and drop $1,200 on a new one. Any ideas?

[cpw]

Is the blue screen generally a hardware or software error? My laptop went down last night with this and I havent been able to restart it I keep getting Windows upon startup asking me to Start With the Windows XP CD, I didnt have The CD at home so I grabbed one from the office today. It just seemed real sudden and I Havent installed any new software so I am starting to think hardware? It is 5 years old but worked great up until now so i really dont NEED to go out and drop $1,200 on a new one. Any ideas?
It can be either. Hopefully you have a backup. The best solution is to reformat the hard disk, and reinstall Windows and see what happens with a fresh install. If it still blue screens, then it is a hardware problem.

[cpw]

Also, if you don't have a backup don't reformat or don't reinstall; once you do that it is pretty much impossible to recover any data.

[darius]

It is 5 years old but worked great up until now so i really dont NEED to go out and drop $1,200 on a new one. Any ideas?

As cpw says it could be either, but if you haven't installed and new software lately then I would start with HDD diagnostics. With hard drives it's not a matter IF but WHEN they will fail. Being mechanical devices they always do and 5 years is just about time.

You may try to slavage trhe drive temporarily in order to boot to it and backup any data you may want to keep. The steps are as follows:


At boot time keep hitting F8 key. If success then select "boot to command prompt"

Type:

chkdsk /f/r and hit enter

The machine will tell you it can't do whatever it is you want to do it but it will do it at next boot time if you press "Y". Do so.

Turn the machine off and reboot. The machine will do "stuff". Don't interrupt. If things go well it will continue booting and you'll have your shot at getting your data. Your success will depend on the extent and number of damage HDD clusters.

If the above works in general then I'd be pretty sure it's the HDD, and it needs to be replaced. This is far cheaper than getting a new lappy.

Ideally, you would get a disk mirroring software, such as Acronis True Image and make a perfect copy of your drive onto a new one, without missing a bit of data.

[Velosapien]

Blue screens usually mean something isn't playing nice with the hardware, whether it be software based like a bad driver or actual hardware failure. If you haven't touched any settings on the computer and it started doing that it's almost certainly hardware failure.

The first thing you should do is take a look at what the blue screen says. Its actually not gibberish and points pretty close to what the problem is. Sometimes you can more or less decipher what the problem is by what it says. In an old computer the culprits are usually a bad harddrive which has already started corrupting the actual windows install or bad ram sticks.

[wrench spinner]

I didnt write down what it said when it blue screened and havent been able to get it back up to read it ill try to resart windows as per everyones recommendations and see how I make out!

[wrench spinner]

ok blue screen of death:

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0X00000024 (0X001902FE, 0xF8c40ac0, 0xf8c407bc, 0x861c36E)

*** Ntfs.sys - Address F861c36E base at F8616000, Datestamp 48025be5

Beginning dump of physical memory

[cpw]

ok blue screen of death:

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0X00000024 (0X001902FE, 0xF8c40ac0, 0xf8c407bc, 0x861c36E)

*** Ntfs.sys - Address F861c36E base at F8616000, Datestamp 48025be5

Beginning dump of physical memory
Good chance it is a HDD problem, because NTFS is the file system.

[wrench spinner]

mmmkay off i go to Best Buy!

[cpw]

mmmkay off i go to Best Buy!
They might not have laptop HDDs, it is a quick 10 minute replacement (hardware wise). Any problems or Qs, you know my #.

Charles

[wrench spinner]

thanks Charles

[Woussko]

If you decide that you do want a hard drive for your laptop PC and can't find one at "Worst Buy" as I call them, I did find several on the Circuit City web site. I hardly call CC a serious computer place but here is what they show. Be sure to check using your ZIP code for which store(s) have stock before you travel out to the store(s).

http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/Hard-drives/sem/rpsm/catOid/-12976/Ns/accm_num_unts_sld|1/N/20012961+20012973+20012976+5216/link/ref/rpem/ccd/categorylist.do

Most desktop/tower PCs have 3-1/2" bays and laptop/notebook PCs have 2-1/2" bays for hard drives. Be careful not to get them mixed up.

Watch out for the correct interface too. IDE-ATA and SATA are not one and the same.
If you can't find what you need locally places like ProVantage, PC Mall, CDW and such have loads more selection. ProVantage normally has good prices too.

CPW should be a big help with this.

[garager]

Try this: If you can get there, it fixed mine more than once....

Go to the command prompt. click run adn then type cmd and then click ok.
on the command prompt type chkdsk /r /f then press enter, then a small window will pop uo saying that you need to schedule a scan after the computer reboots,just click ok or yes. after that restart the computer. This will check the HDD for bad sector or bad cluster and then fix it, this may take time depending on the problem (if there is). I do not think it is cause of virus for you can use it for over a month, mostly if you are infected your computer will not last long.

[Herk]

I've had good success running checkdisk sometimes.

Be careful running it if your drive is full. That can be very serious. You need about 15% of your drive empty for Windows to function properly. And you can't stop the disk check once you've started it.

When my Linux hard drive failed yesterday, I first had to look inside to determine what the brand of the drive was, then I used the Maxtor software to check it. Yup, it was dead.

Blue screens' error codes can be helpful in diagnosing the problem, or sometimes they can send you in the wrong direction. The very first dead XP computer I worked on was a victim of the full drive. But it was also so full of viruses that you couldn't start it and run it. The viruses had replicated until they had filled about half the drive. The error codes pointed toward something else entirely.

I used a boot disk of some kind with file system utilities to remove blocks of files and then the machine started and I was able to get busy cleaning it. I keep several different kinds of repair disks handy. You can use a live Linux CD to start the machine and examine the filesystem unless the drive is really toast.

[garager]

Everytime I ran checkdisk my computer would go to the blue screen of death. Then I had some one come up with this direction and it worked wonderful, fixed my problem instantly. But if I ever have to reinstall windows then I also will have to redo this method again, or my computer will go to the blue screen again.

Which I did have to, because I crashed my system again about 2 months ago. I swear to god, I need to stop monkeying around with my computer. I'm its worst nightmare. I just love digging around and find things then try to understand them. I must say, I haven't been messin' in Registry that often lately, thats a good thing.... :D

[biggdog]

0x00000024 is a critical Windows error and is caused by a corrupt registry entry that should be repaired immediately to prevent further corruption in other applications and/or hardware. Risks include hardware failure, blue screen errors and fatal crashes.

Computers are my other life.:)