PieterVanNuffel
Beta member
- Messages
- 3
Hi all, I would like some help with a very bizarre crash my Windows XP Pro (SP2) has.
I recently did a complete reinstall to get rid of this crash but it appeared again.
The crash
My install has only 1 user, so the screen to select the user is skipped after the black animated screen (with the colored bar) and I immediately get 'Welcome' after which my dekstop shows.
If I boot my pc, it crashes at that exact spot when 'Welcome' should have shown.
Possible ways of crashing:
-pc simply shuts down without any feedback
-pc reboots
-pc simply hangs (numlock frozen)
-pc gives a light blue screen (not a BSOD), after which it crashes/reboots
-pc has a black background and a window warning message saying 'the application could not be executed' without saying which one, but it mentions a stupid hex number, I guess a pointer to the program or something else. After 1 sec the pc shuts down/reboots.
Here is the weird part: If the pc reboots, it would get right up to the same point and have one of those above behaviours until at some point the pc just shut down. If I were to reboot the pc at that stage sometimes it would boot fine, but mostly it would do a 'crash' again.
If I pull the electrical plug after a crash (& shutdown) for 2 seconds, put it back in and boot the system works fine for about 95% of the cases. WTF???
Bottom line: PC crashes/reboots => shuts down. I pull the plug briefly, reboot and everything is just fine.
This is just plain stupid.
My pc itself is a (newly installed) blackviper.com tweaked clean pc. No spyware or whatever, nothing of the kind.
I remember that this behaviour started when I added a Voodoo3 3000 PCI card (GeForce MX420 AGP installed already) and turned on dual screen support (with the desktop extended to the other screen). But when I removed the PCI card later the behaviour stayed, perhaps the windows dualscreen subsystem stayed loaded all that time?
The real problem I have is the fact that nothing says what crashed or why it did so. I turned on bootlogging (giving a ntbtlog.txt in the system root) but I could not figure out which thing crashed: The last entry in it, or the entry that should have normally come? I tried disabling both, but those entries are system drivers, and for a lot of those windows simply copies a backup when it detects the driver is gone (renamed, in fact). So I can't say for sure it is such a driver causing the crashes or something else.
I know there is a log system at the control panel (system management > logfiles I guess, I have a dutch install) where I could see a crash of my TOPCOM modem driver, so at that point I though I have found the error, but removing the driver completely (and disconnecting the device) never stopped the problem.
(The modem error has a red circle with a white cross in it, at the exact timing the pc always crashes, and the 'Service control manager' is the source of the error. Some more info is given for this error but nothing seems to be of any use.)
So my problem is, can anybody guess what is wrong with my system, or help me find a more detailed logging system.
Using linux primarily makes me furious about the closed black box windows is, in linux I have dozens of log files I can inspect and mostly can solve stuff on my own.
(Another strange thing: even Knoppix fails to boot on this particular pc sometimes. After the 'autoconfiguring devices' normally it detecs the system devices one by one and gets into X, but 4 out of 5 times it suddenly warns 'no more services in this runleven, shutting down' after which it gets to runlevel 0 to shut down. Very very bizarre and might be related.)
PS. I'm kinda a computer expert, having used DOS, Win 95 (plain&OSR2), 98, Me, 2000, XP and Mandrake 8.2, SuSE 8.2, Knoppix 3.2->3.9 and my current primary desktop is Mandriva LE 2005. Just so you guys know.
I recently did a complete reinstall to get rid of this crash but it appeared again.
The crash
My install has only 1 user, so the screen to select the user is skipped after the black animated screen (with the colored bar) and I immediately get 'Welcome' after which my dekstop shows.
If I boot my pc, it crashes at that exact spot when 'Welcome' should have shown.
Possible ways of crashing:
-pc simply shuts down without any feedback
-pc reboots
-pc simply hangs (numlock frozen)
-pc gives a light blue screen (not a BSOD), after which it crashes/reboots
-pc has a black background and a window warning message saying 'the application could not be executed' without saying which one, but it mentions a stupid hex number, I guess a pointer to the program or something else. After 1 sec the pc shuts down/reboots.
Here is the weird part: If the pc reboots, it would get right up to the same point and have one of those above behaviours until at some point the pc just shut down. If I were to reboot the pc at that stage sometimes it would boot fine, but mostly it would do a 'crash' again.
If I pull the electrical plug after a crash (& shutdown) for 2 seconds, put it back in and boot the system works fine for about 95% of the cases. WTF???
Bottom line: PC crashes/reboots => shuts down. I pull the plug briefly, reboot and everything is just fine.
This is just plain stupid.
My pc itself is a (newly installed) blackviper.com tweaked clean pc. No spyware or whatever, nothing of the kind.
I remember that this behaviour started when I added a Voodoo3 3000 PCI card (GeForce MX420 AGP installed already) and turned on dual screen support (with the desktop extended to the other screen). But when I removed the PCI card later the behaviour stayed, perhaps the windows dualscreen subsystem stayed loaded all that time?
The real problem I have is the fact that nothing says what crashed or why it did so. I turned on bootlogging (giving a ntbtlog.txt in the system root) but I could not figure out which thing crashed: The last entry in it, or the entry that should have normally come? I tried disabling both, but those entries are system drivers, and for a lot of those windows simply copies a backup when it detects the driver is gone (renamed, in fact). So I can't say for sure it is such a driver causing the crashes or something else.
I know there is a log system at the control panel (system management > logfiles I guess, I have a dutch install) where I could see a crash of my TOPCOM modem driver, so at that point I though I have found the error, but removing the driver completely (and disconnecting the device) never stopped the problem.
(The modem error has a red circle with a white cross in it, at the exact timing the pc always crashes, and the 'Service control manager' is the source of the error. Some more info is given for this error but nothing seems to be of any use.)
So my problem is, can anybody guess what is wrong with my system, or help me find a more detailed logging system.
Using linux primarily makes me furious about the closed black box windows is, in linux I have dozens of log files I can inspect and mostly can solve stuff on my own.
(Another strange thing: even Knoppix fails to boot on this particular pc sometimes. After the 'autoconfiguring devices' normally it detecs the system devices one by one and gets into X, but 4 out of 5 times it suddenly warns 'no more services in this runleven, shutting down' after which it gets to runlevel 0 to shut down. Very very bizarre and might be related.)
PS. I'm kinda a computer expert, having used DOS, Win 95 (plain&OSR2), 98, Me, 2000, XP and Mandrake 8.2, SuSE 8.2, Knoppix 3.2->3.9 and my current primary desktop is Mandriva LE 2005. Just so you guys know.