Strange blue screen problem

iwb

I am trying to help my brother out with a Dell machine that was badly infested with various viruses, malware and other bad stuff. We managed to back up his data and I went about wiping and reinstalling Windows. (MCE 2005 to be exact)

It starts to load drivers and so on (after it says press F6 to .....) and at the end of that process, it just blue screens every time. He says it did it from time to time before also.

I have tried a totally clean hard drive, swapping ram and used Dells utilities to throughly check the machine also to no avail. I also tried Ultimate boot disk and it blue screened. However, I successfully ran Ubuntu and for the heck of it, installed it on the hard drive from the computer. I still can't load windows though.

The only think left I can think of is the BIOS. Anyone got any bright ideas? If I upgrade the bios, will that get rid of any potential virus problems? Otherwise, is there a scanner that checks the bios, preferably in Linux?

The STOP error code on the blue screen, is it 0x0000007B? If so then you're installing Windows XP using a SATA CD-ROM drive and XP doesn't know what SATA controller the machine has. The easiest way around this would be to go into the BIOS and change the SATA operation mode to IDE/ATA mode.

iwb

Karsini, right on both counts. I hadn't bothered to google the error message as it was always a waste of time in the past.


I couldn't find a setting in the bios, but I have a usb cd drive and it is all working very well now.

A huge thanks for your help. I would have spent many more fruitless hours at this without your input.

Cluster

iwb wrote: »

I am trying to help my brother out with a Dell machine that was badly infested with various viruses, malware and other bad stuff. We managed to back up his data and I went about wiping and reinstalling Windows. (MCE 2005 to be exact)

It starts to load drivers and so on (after it says press F6 to .....) and at the end of that process, it just blue screens every time. He says it did it from time to time before also.

I have tried a totally clean hard drive, swapping ram and used Dells utilities to throughly check the machine also to no avail. I also tried Ultimate boot disk and it blue screened. However, I successfully ran Ubuntu and for the heck of it, installed it on the hard drive from the computer. I still can't load windows though.

The only think left I can think of is the BIOS. Anyone got any bright ideas? If I upgrade the bios, will that get rid of any potential virus problems? Otherwise, is there a scanner that checks the bios, preferably in Linux?

Find out the Error:

Stop it from flashing away and find the complete error code, to do this. click on start, then right click on my comp, properties, then choose advance tab, under start up and recovery click the settings. under system failure uncheck automatic system restart.

Get the error then google it and see what other people have done with a similar error

iwb

Hi Cluster. Thanks very much for your help. Karsini solved it for me earlier. It was a SATA DVD drive in the machine.