PG Blue Screen of Death HELP!!!

[liberty556]

Hi all,

I know this is a gun forum but the computer forums are over my head and I need some down to earth help. I have a blue screen of death on my PC with an error message -
Stop: 0X0000007E (0X80000003,0X805BA6EC,0XF78A22B8,0XF78A1FB4)

I think it may have something to do with BIOS or a driver. The PC will not go past that screen for me to update the BIOS.

Any help would be appreciated.

[ehidle]

If you can boot into safe mode (start hitting F8 when powering up the computer until you get a boot menu), go to the event viewer and see if there are exceptions in any device drivers, then replace any device drivers that have errors listed.

A 7E stop is an unhandled exception - basically some thread generated a CPU exception with a null or invalid jump address, so instead of executing a bunch of garbage instructions at a random address, all exceptions with null or bad target addresses jump to the stop routine.

This is usually caused by a driver for a PCI device trying to jump to an address outside the PCI address space, or a program trying to jump to address inside a reserved or protected space, or something like that.

[liberty556]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick response. I pressed F8 and the message was a boot error that a device could found. So, I found my diagnostic disk that came from Dell and I am running that to see if it can repair the problem.

Do you think it could be an issue with Windows and it needs to be re-loaded?

I can get to the set up screen but I'm not sure what to look for. I put all the setting to Dell recommended. I did see a message about a floppy drive.

By the way, I'm using my laptop to communicate with you. My desktop is the PC having issues.

[Azzy]

In layman's terms...


Try hitting F8 after the bios loads, before windows (modern machines speed makes this harder) and then try the "Safe mode" selection.

You can also try the "Last good known configuration" selection, that helps if you had windows update install a video driver (which generally causes a crash in XP).

Which OS btw? Windows Vista and 7 offer easier solutions for repair than XP.

[Azzy]

OK, saw you posted while I was doing the same

Another option to try. remove all but essential usb items... printers, hubs, whatever.

[dc dalton]

Here's a great list of the reasons for blue screens (stop codes):

http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/Windo...es-t43519.html

have fun .. ain't windows great (worst piece of shit ever built) .. some day try a great Linux distribution and you will find what out what a computer is supposed to be like.

[Curmudgeon]

Hi,

Thanks for the quick response. I pressed F8 and the message was a boot error that a device could [not be] found. So, I found my diagnostic disk that came from Dell and I am running that to see if it can repair the problem.

Do you think it could be an issue with Windows and it needs to be re-loaded?

I can get to the set up screen but I'm not sure what to look for. I put all the setting to Dell recommended. I did see a message about a floppy drive.

By the way, I'm using my laptop to communicate with you. My desktop is the PC having issues.

*bold is mine, and I inserted the [not be]

I'm betting...

1) Boot sector corrupted, or
2) Hard disk damaged at boot sector, or
3) Hard disk failure.

Unfortunately, I have seen all the above in recent years. If merely corrupted, repair/recovery should get you going again. If not, I see a hard drive purchase on your horizon.

[ehidle]

*bold is mine, and I inserted the [not be]

I'm betting...

1) Boot sector corrupted, or
2) Hard disk damaged at boot sector, or
3) Hard disk failure.

Unfortunately, I have seen all the above in recent years. If merely corrupted, repair/recovery should get you going again. If not, I see a hard drive purchase on your horizon.

If he is getting far enough to get a Windows Stop, then the disk is booting. It could be that F8 on his computer does something at the BIOS level, like maybe a boot device menu, or maybe it's a BIOS hotkey to book from another source.

Anyway, the trick is to catch the F8 just as Windows is starting to load, after all of the diagnostics run. It's not always easy, which is why I usually just tell people to start hitting F8 as soon as they turn the thing on. Heh....

Good advice from Azzy to remove all USB devices, as it could be one of these drivers that is causing the issue.

Anyway, if you can get into Safe mode, there'd be nothing wrong with using that to copy off all of your data, and then nuking the thing from Orbit and reinstalling everything. I like to do that to a Windows box every so often, anyway.

[liberty556]

Okay everyone,

I ran the diagnostics disk and everything passed. I was able to get to the F8 Safe Mode selection and when I choose safe mode I get many lines with different drivers listed at the end. Then it just stops.

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS\AppPat ch\drvmain\.sdb
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS\System 32\Drivers\ACPI.sys
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS\System 32\Drivers\WMILIB.SYS
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS\System 32\Drivers\pci.sys

and so on......

[ehidle]

What does it say on the last line you see before it stops?