Help! My computer won;t do anything!

[gblouin86]

Alright so I've this computer for a while now, haven't changed any hardware for about 6 months, then one day, it starts randomly restarting with now warning. Then it started doing this more frequently, so I decided hey, might as well reformat, I've been meaning to anyway. That's where the major problems started.
I can't get windows XP to format the hard-drive without having a STOP error message or the system just restarting. I've gotten the following STOP errors:

0x50 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
0xC2 BAD_POOL_CALLER
0x4E PFN_LIST_CORRUPT

All these point to bad RAM or driver problems. Since there is no Operating System on my computer right now, I can't see how it could be driver problems. So I tested the memory with memtest, a million errors, tried switching around and removing different modules, a million errors. So I tried putting in RAM that I know works, same problem when formatting the HDD. Last night I ran memtest again with my original RAM in, no errors but I still can't format.

Can someone please tell me what's going on?

 

[brady]

Do you hear any clicking coming from your HDD ?
When you "reformat" do you pick the "Quick Format" option or the full format ?

Does the error come from reformatting or reinstalling ?

 

[gblouin86]

I don't hear any clicking and I always use full formatting. The error sometimes occurs before I do anything but mostly it seems to occur while XP setup is formatting the HDD. I don't think it's an HDD problem.

 

[brady]

My first thought was to see if another HDD would work.. but if you don't think its a HDD issue, then im stumped.

 

[jcambece]

Have you checked the cd, could also be cd-rom but I agree with brady sounds like HD.

 

[gblouin86]

I've tried both my disc drives and 2 different XP cds so it's not that. How do I run chkdsk on the HDD without a boot disc or O/S? Thinkin back I remember having an issue with the HD at some point this summer and problems started occuring after that so I'd like to test. Also I have another HD but for some reason XP setup can never detect it because it's SATA even though I specify the additional device and have the drivers on a disc.

 

[brady]

New HDD

 

[!hunk!]

check the bios, set it to default,then save and exit.start the format.

 

[Nitestick]

hdd sounds like the problem. run memtest again see if you can get those error free results again.

 

[gblouin86]

fixed the problem, turns out is was the CPU L2 cache. I disabled it in the BIOS and everything ran fine.