Tyranny

Hey I really need some help. Last night my computer was running fine. Shut it down before I went to bed. Came home from work, turned on my computer and when the windows loading screen should have popped up I got a white bar with black bars at the bottom of the screen, a load bar of sorts. Then it went straight to a blue screen that I should check my hard drive for virus's or remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. I just bought the hard drive about 2 weeks ago, it has been working fine for those 2 weeks up until now. If I remove it then the computer wont boot anyways because its the only hard drive I have other than the one that blew on me, built my computer with all new components including a gfx card, hard drive, motherboard, power supply. It wont let me login to windows in safe mode or normal mode. None of the options work, so im stuck on how I should go about fixing it. Told me to run CHKDSK /F in the command prompt, but I cant without logging into windows first can I? Error/tech message was as follows,

***Stop:0x0000007B (0xBA4C3524, 0xC00034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

entropy128

Take a look at the KB article for the STOP error you received:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103

So there's probably something wrong with your MBR, due to a virus or whatever.

My first suggestion is that if you have a retail (legit or otherwise) copy of XP, you can start the recovery console and run a "chkdsk" from there, but also look into the "fixmbr" command, as I think that will fix your problem.
http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixthe...s/rconsole.htm

dai

what are you running
video card
cpu
m/board
ram
power supply
brand
wattage

check the listings in the bios for voltages and temperatures and post them

if the suggestion in the above post don't get you back in,check you can see the drive listed in the bios ok

Tyranny

Will do, ill post it all tomorrow, going to head to sleep now, i inserted my xp sp2 disc to try to reinstall it and i dont remember getting the repair wizzard. But i could be mistaken, going to bed for the moment. Ill post my comp specs tomorrow evening when i get off work. Thanks for the help thus far.

entropy128

I've never seen a retail copy of the XP installation disc that didn't have the Recovery Console. I linked you to step-by-step instructions on how to launch it. It's there, but you normally wouldn't chose the specific option if you're just installing. There are also plenty of freeware recovery boot disks out there (bootdisk.com), but this is the simplest option if you already have the XP disc at hand.

After you select your installation under the Recovery Console, try running "fixmbr", reboot, and if nothing else, you should be able to access the F8 menu now (safe mode, last known good, etc). If fixmbr works, I'd still recommend you fire up the recovery console again and run a full "chkdsk /r" just to make sure your filesystem is healthy (you can't do this while Windows is running and using the disk).

You already tried / thought about re-installing? Don't you have data on there that you wish to save?

Tyranny

Mobo-EP43-UD3L Ultra Durable 3 from Gigabyte
Gfx Card-MSI Pci Express N9400GT MDIG
Power Supply-Antec 650 Watt Earthwatts ps.
Ram-3.5gb PNY
CPU-Intel Pentium Dual Core Proc. @ 2.5ghz
Hdd-WD Caviar Blue 500gb, <<<You should know that already.

I ran CHKDSK in the recovery console and it said "The Volume appears to be in good condition and was not checked. Use /p if you want to check it anyway.
Typed in /p and it kept saying that the command was not recognized. Im thinking it may be my raid set-up. But im not entirely sure. Any suggestions?

Also, I tried the fixmbr command but it kind of has me running scared atm, did not follow through with the command because of the message "This computer appears to have a non-standard or invalid master boot record. FIXMBR may damage your partition tables if you proceed. This could cause all the partitions on the curred hard disk to become inaccessible. If you are not having problems accessing your drive, do not continue. What should I do? Ive been able to set up everything myself and everything on my previous computer without any problems, this is the first time ive ran into this problem and I have no clue as to what I should do. Also important not, im not sure how many of you are familiar with the Ventrilo client, voice chatting server, but I downloaded it as an accomplice to the mmorpg I play, when I tried opening it it seemingly lagged out my computer for afew minutes, would not boot vent. and acted like all of my memory and resources were being used. Could not open anything, close anything, not even my task manage, I believe that the vent. file may be whats causing the problem, how would I go about removing it outside of Windows?

I ran the fixmbr command after selecting "start windows normally." it said windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt..."\windows\system32\config\system"

No not really, this is just a gaming computer for the most part, I would love to save myself the time and effort of having to download the day long installation but if I have to reinstall it then im fine with it I suppose. Could you tell me how to go about reformatting outside of Windows?

dai

i have never worked with raid so i am wary of helping in case i make the situation worse

i would normally run fixboot not fixmbr

chkdsk /r
chkdsk /f
chkdsk /p

are the command lines you may be missing the space after the k

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545

entropy128

Rephrase that first sentence for me? Do you mean that AFTER you ran fixmbr, you tried to "start windows normally", and you get this new error? So you're getting further than before after running fixmbr? Which would mean that fixmbr fixed your boot record, but there's something even deeper wrong with your OS system files. In that case, you'd have to do a " repair installation" (this is not a normal install) to get the OS working again. It re-installs system files and leaves your data/documents/programs/appdata/etc intact.
The "\windows\system32\config\system" file has something to do with the SAM file and the login process. So basically, your OS is f'ed ATM.

You could also try booting from a LiveCD to recover your data to an external hard drive, and then reformat. Knoppix is pretty popular, but it's linux-based, and therefore does not have native NTFS drivers (you need to write files to your external). It should have NTFS-3g for write support now, which performed very well last time I used it. If you can get your hands on BartPE/WinPE you'll be better off because they're Windows based.

Tyranny

For step 6 of that repair process it doesnt give me a repair option, it says
*To set up Windows XP on the selected item, press ENTER.
*To create a partition in the unpartitioned space, press C.
*To delete the selected partition, press D.

I have Windows Xp Home Edition btw. Sorry for all of the long messages lol. They are a pain to read through I know, but much thanks for all of your help thus far.

Also I have C: Partition1 [NTFS] 476930 MB (455691 MB free)
And another "Unpartitioned space" that is only 8 MB, any idea what the 8 Mb would consist of?

raptor_pa

It is 8 MB of space that can't be used in the NTFS file system due to cluster sizes, and logical boundaries. It's not unusual to see something like this.

Tyranny

Ok so I chose to set up windows xp on the selected item being C: Partition1 [NTFS] 476930 MB and it told me that I had chose to install windows xp on a partition that contains another operating system. Installing windows xp on this partition might the other operating system to function improperly.

Caution: Installing multiple operating systems on a single partition is not recommended. Its the only partition I have, so should I delete the current Partition and then install it? Or will it make all partitions unusable, the question im trying to ask is, if I delete the partition im using now, will the 476930 [NTFS] still be available as a partition or will it mess something up?

Lol another post by me yet again, just an opinion quest though, I just located my windows xp registration key, which I didnt have before all of this happened, so therefore I was not able to update my Windows xp to windows sp2-sp3, do all of you think that that may have been an underlying cause to my problems now? Another words if I re-install windows xp again, and upgrade to sp2-sp3 should it solve my problem with the ventrilo client and other objects? Spoke to a friend of mine that works in a comp tech company and he said that it may have caused some compatibility issues with anything and everything that would require one of the sp packages.

raptor_pa

Sounds like it is not recognizing the old installation, you could elect to delete the partition that would eliminate the message, or ehn prompted to select the folder, select the current windows folder.

Tyranny

Yeah I just opted to reformat, upgrade to sp2-sp3 to see how it goes, hopefully everything will run smooth after the updates. But if not then all of you will see my crying out to you once again perhaps. Any suggestions for me after I reformat to make sure my system runs smooth? Any post download things I should do?

And thanks to everyone who took a minute or more out of their time to help me out :D

Installation is complete, I got an error message during the setup/installation procedure that said setup cannot copy sseriff.fo_ and vga850.fo_, i skipped the sserrif.fo_ and im planning on skipping the vga also, not sure if these files are needed or not. reply back asap plz. Pretty sure their will be afew more files like this also.

raptor_pa

Those look like font files, usually an indication of a bad CD or a bad spot on teh hard drive, might want to run the manufacturer's diagnostics on the HD after install/

Tyranny

My computer is built out of all random manufacturer parts. Is their a built in diag. utility I can use? My dell disk wont work on anything that isn't from dell, go figure.

Stupid question in my last post btw. Fonts wont really effect anything performance wise I wouldnt say anyways. Restarted the setup section and the same error messages came up. Ill skip them and then see about fixing them after install I suppose.

raptor_pa

Download the utility from the HD manufacturer's site at support.wdc.com.

Tyranny

I skipped the sseriff file as well as all of the vga files, it started normal installation afterwards, and at about 52% my computer shut off on its own. Restarted my computer again and it restarted the setup procedure all over again, made me have to skip them all over again, instead of doing it all over again I rebooted once more and went into the repair console on my xp disk and typed CHKDSK and it said one or more errors were found, I then typed CHKDSK /R and its at 62% atm. Slow going process for the moment. Im hoping it resolves my "font" issue, found the file folder in the setup menu when it wanted me to search for the file location, double clicked it to open it and both of the pages froze up and said not responding, it never started responding again, so I ran the chkdsk repair option, and thats where im at now.

Tyranny

Ahh ok, ill try this idea if CHKDSK /R doesnt work and if it allows me to login to windows.

raptor_pa

The WD utility will check the physical state of the disk, chkdsk only checks the logical file system.

Tyranny

Ok cool deal. Im just trying to get my hard drive and xp disk to copy the vga and sseriff files atm. Not sure the computer will let me pass the setup screen if i cant manage to get those files added. Had a power failure after skipping all of them. So hopefully this will work. ty