[Overmyhead]

My wife has a HP Pav which used to have WinME. After months of frustrating issues with crashes, I upgraded it to WinXP Home. The system has run for months without any problems until yesterday. Now the system crashes in one of two ways:

1)Black screen with message "operating system not found"
-or-
2)Blue screen with Hewlitt Packard logo frozen

In both cases I can reboot the PC and everything seems normal - including safemode checks. The crashes seem to occur randomly (e.g. when no one is using the PC)

Also, event viewer show an error with the source of "atapi" and event "9".

The PC does have active up-to-date virus protection and scans clean.

What things can I check?
Ben Overmyhead

PC Details:
256MB RAM (upgraded from 128 original)
900MHz AMD Duron
40G hard drive
HP Pavillion XT926
Win XP (upgraded from WinME)

 

[Ghrrom]

Goto your HDD's manufacurer's site and download their HDD testing software, ATAPI (AT Attachment Packet Interface) is the protocol/language that your system bus uses across the IDE/EIDE cables. Kinda points to either your motherboard, Disk drive/CD ROM, or other device connected to the IDE/EIDE cables.
Try opening up the case and be sure all the cables are securely attached, and it's not too dusty in there, if the king of dust bunnies has taken residence, fetch the vaccum, canned air is overrated. be sure that there are no left over residues on the CPU or other components from dust getting toasted inside your machine.

As allways, check device manager, and think back about the last known program/hardware installation you did, try undoing it and see if that fixes it.

:bandit:

 

[Linksys_Tech]

 

[Overmyhead]

ATAPI not related

I'll give the cleanout a good check and make sure cables are good after (they're secure now - already checked that).

...but it just crashed again when no one was using it. This time there's no error in the event log. nothing at all.

Ben O.

 

[Ghrrom]

You checked all three of the system components listed in event viewer? Also there were no alerts reguarding services lost? Device Manager checked out ok?

Well that is strange, describe this 'crash' does the computer reboot, or does it just hang?

Does your BIOS detect your hardware ok?

Sorry to ask so may questions, but I'm trying to get a handle on where your computer is snagging.

:smash:

 

[Overmyhead]

More details

The event viewer doesn't show any errors except the one listed above which seems to be unrelated based on the most recent crashes. There were no warnings or signs before this started happening yesterday. I did find out my wife and kids installed a game from a CDROM several days back, but I uninstalled that without any difference in the problem.

By crashes I mean that the computer goes from working fine (windows up) to completely locked up showing either the black screen (operating system not found) or the blue screen (HP logo) -- windows in not up at this point. I haven't seen the failure happen - it always seems to happen when no one is using the machine - so I don't know if it shuts off and reboots then getting "hung" or if it goes directly to the black/blue screen.

When I reboot the machine (power off and on) it restarts fine but takes a while as it verifies integrity. One of the times I tried to interrupt the reboot and got the following: (roughly quoted as I was scribbling the info down as fast as possible)

"lost chain detected...cluster 49223 ... convert lost chains to files...4 files recovered"

I disabled the screen saver just to be sure that wasn't causing the crash - no change.

I've blown out all the dust and verified connections - no change.

The HDD is a Fujitsu MPG3409AT -- I'll see if I can try to locate the diagnostic software as a next step, I guess.

B. O.

 

[Ghrrom]

I can tell you that the chains and clusters stuff is refering to misc data on your HDD that scandisk recovered for you. Go into your system menu and be sure that "reboot on critical error" box is unchecked (see [system] icon in control panel, it's there somewhere with the rest of the error reporting stuff). With any luck you should get the infamous "blue screen of death" next time it crashes vice a missing OS error message.
Check your BIOS settings as well, be sure that it is checking your HDD first, and check the jumper settings to be sure that they are on cable select (CS) or have the HDD on "Master w. Slave"

Later