Blue screen of death

[geekster]

Im trying to help a friend. specs are --- Dell Dimension 4400 , XP, 1.6 ghz processor , 128 ram , hard drive unknown. He says he installed a game and it froze and when he rebooted it , a blue screen flashes and it boots to a menu that has options like boot normal or boot to last working config. No matter what option you choose it reboots and comes back to the same menu. I tried to use the os disk and changed the bios to boot from cd drive and it didnt work. Any help would be appreciated.
Geekster

 

[ZenOswyn]

Try booting into safe mode and uninstalling the game. After you see the BIOS screen press F8 and a menu will appear to get you into safe mode. Uninstall the game and reboot to see if it returns to normal functionality.

 

[geekster]

That was one of the options on the menu when it boots up. None of the safe modes work.
Geekster

 

[ZenOswyn]

Sorry about that, I misunderstood.

You say that you also changed the BIOS settings to put by cd-rom and then hard disk, and it didn't boot from the CD either. I haven't used an old dell laptop in a while, but I believe there's a page in the BIOS that displays the devices in each drive bay. Try to find that and see if the CD drive is even being recognized by the computer. I believe the boot order list just has a generic list of devices that could be plugged in, and not necessarily a list of what is actually in the drive bays.

I think it's better to fix the issue with the cd drive first, so you can have more options later on.

 

[steak1986]

I also think that if you press f12 then on startup, it gives you a boot menu. Then put the xp cd in and boot from it. You can try to run Repair console in the xp setup. If you can run the repair disk and it fixes it just well enough to get into safe mode, then you can system restore. I think if u get a system restore everything should be fine. This is a text book question for the a plus test.

 

[geekster]

I tried f12 and it gave me the option to boot from cd, but it wouldnt boot. It keeps restarting back to the options menu--- safe mode, last good config, normal. I tried a win98 floppy and the a drive boots up. Can you access the c drive through the a drive on xp? Maybe I can run a chkdsk or restore through the a drive.

 

[geekster]

Any other ideas that might help?

 

[ZenOswyn]

You should be able to make a boot disk (err... boot floppy) in another XP machine and get to the C drive.

Those old dell laptops can be tough to fix with the CD is broken. I got one off ebay for 10 bucks a few years ago, maybe you could give that a try, as it sounds like the current one might be broken.

But I am curious if it worked before he installed the game and everything went bad?

Also, this may work as a last resort, but you can buy a small cable that will allow you to plug in a laptop drive to a normal IDE cable. If you were to do that you would be able to do more with it.

 

[fixal0t]

try removing the HDD, put it in an external enclosure, hook it up to another windows computer
granted you didn't protect any of the files, you should be able to mess with any of the files you want

 

[geekster]

try removing the HDD, put it in an external enclosure, hook it up to another windows computer
granted you didn't protect any of the files, you should be able to mess with any of the files you want

We win !!!! I removed th hd and put it as a slave drive in my home comp. I was then able to run a chkdsk on the hd with my system. Chkdsk found errors and fixed them. I also defragged it and when I put the drive back in the original comp, it booted up like new. Thanks fixal0t for your help.