Blue Screen of Death while Windows loading

[imported_KuJaX]

I am trying to help a relative with her computer. Basically as windows boots (it asks me for safe mode, or normal mode, last good config, etc and I have selected everything) and everytime it goes into a blue screen of death that says something for one split second. So fast that I can't even makeout one word that it says before the computer restarts. Anything that I can do to see what this is saying? Any suggestions?

 

[imported_MSX]

This happened to me before...at the time I didn't have any old HD's with Windows installed, so I had enough and formatted the HD.

If it comes down to this, I'd suggest hooking her HD up as a slave and copying her files over to a HD with space to fit it, then format and reinstall Windows on her HD and transfer the file back over.

Good luck

 

[treize]

Sometimes on that boot menu an option comes up to disable automatic restart, which is what is preventing you from seeing the error, check that.

If you have an XP disk handy you can boot into the recovery console and then run the chkdsk command on the hard drive. Sometimes that comes up from a filesystem corruption, and chkdsk can repair it. There's also the bootcfg /rebuild command that can also sometimes fix installs that won't boot, read it here: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=185301251

If that doesn't work, I second making a backup of the main hard drive. Either use the slave setup MSX suggested, or get a secondary or external drive for the main machine and load up a bootable hard disk cloning program like Ghost. I'd also recommend a memory test and full hard drive scan, to help rule out hardware going bad.

 

[dclive]

Choose the disable auto restart feature, and then come back and tell us exactly what the full stop code error message is (we just need the first line).

If it's inaccessible boot disk, just boot with the XP CD into recovery console (F10 at first boot screen, after CD has loaded for 5 minutes) and then run chkdsk.