bsod on startup :( Options

[=R6= Raile]

yo guys

so last night my computer decided to bsod on me while it was just sitting at the desktop. Since then, it bsod'd about 5 seconds after loading the desktop each time I booted it. The first time I tried to boot in safe mode, it worked, however, the second time I booted it up, now safe mode won't work either (it gets to a black screen, with a mouse cursor, but just hangs there. even when booting in to safe mode with dos prompt only). So I'm kind of fucked. I've tried removing each ram stick and seeing if any of those are causing the problem. I've tried using the windows boot up disk (i'm using vista btw) to repair windows, do a system restore, and check for memory problems. basically I did every test the windows disk has to offer, and nothing worked. I'm guessing it's gotta be hardware? Though I didn't think it mattered, I pulled out my audio board anyway and tried booting but no change. It's the only thing I think I can unplug and test. All I've got left is the mb, graphics card, and harddrive. Any suggestions on how I find out what the problem is?

Cheers

[MonkeyFiend]

[Edit: Out of curiosity when you get to a black screen with mouse cursor in safe mode, does pressing ctrl-alt-delete bring up taskmanager? If so it might just be a corrupt explorer]

If the problem happened then worked on safe mode, then broke again it's intermittant and so unlikely to be hardware utterly failing (with the exception of memory). It's more likely something in the registry has become ballsed up. If you have a windows disk, boot off this, open the recovery console and go to your main drive.

Make a backup of all the files in the C:\WINDOWS\system32\config directory (as in make a directory called 'backup' in C:\ go to the config directory and copy *.* c:\backup)

There is a folder in windows\repair (this directory never shows up, but it is there), contains these kind of files:

C:\WINDOWS\repair>ls
autoexec.nt
config.nt
default
sam
secsetup.inf
security
setup.log
software
system

Copy these file to the following previous directory: C:\WINDOWS\system32\config in the following order:

The first one you should try should be the system file. If you do this and test and it still doesn't work next do the sam file and if that fails copy the remaining ones.

These are good copies of the system hive files. If you copy these it will start the computer up with these files (which is mostly like a clean registry). Typically this type of bluescreen is a corruption of the sytem hive that handles the mangement of drivers and handling between hardware and the operating system. Doing this will likely clear all of your drivers from being active e.g. you'll get generic video, sound etc., but since the drivers will still be on the computer, a quick hardware update wizard should find the correct ones straight away. (If the registry is corrupt doing this will be fine, if the drivers themselves are corrupt, updating the drivers will result in bluescreening again, but then you should know which one is causing the problem and replace it)

One caveat is that if copying the 'system' file doesn't work and you need to copy your 'software' file, this will likely mean a lot of the software and games would need reinstalling or repairing. However I suspect this is unlikely as most of these sorts of issues are fixed with the system file. If that doesn't work you can always copy the backed up files back to put you back to square one.