Computer reboots while loading Windows

[Hork]

My friend's computer stopped working a while back. When loading Windows XP Home, it would give a

STOP 0x000000C2
BAD_POOL_CALLER

error, whether trying to load windows normally or in safe mode.

It also tries to run checkdisk and finds a bunch of cross-linked files each time it does.

Searching on the web, this BAD_POOL_CALLER message seems to be associated with several different things: bad memory, bad reaction to a recently installed device driver, etc...

Machine is a Sony Vaio with a 1.5 GHz Pentium. OS is Windows XP Home. Recent hardware additions include connection to a cable modem, and for some reason the cable guy connected by the ethernet and USB ports, but it ran without trouble for a week before this happened. The idiot was running without a virus scanner, so I'm thinking viruses corrupted the OS.

I found out there wasn't much space on the boot partition. I took out the drive and put it in another machine and freed up some space. I also ran a virus scan and found it was infected with bugbear, netsky, mydoom, etc... so I cleaned those up.

I put it back in the original machine and used a bootable windows CD to repair the installation.

Now when I restart the computer it just reboots every time when it is loading Windows, whether trying to load in safe mode or not.

I think I'll put the drive back in the other machine and ran scandisk/chkdisk and return the drive to the original machine and try repairing windows again.

Does anyone know how I can troubleshoot the bootup sequence to find out what is causing it to reboot?

I'm trying to avoid reinstalling Windows completely.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[montag451]

can you shove the drive into another system as a slave
[can get an adaptor]

then do a full virus scan/adaware/trojanhunter/spybot etc

 

[Hork]

I've put it in another computer and run a virus scan and found a bunch of viruses which I removed, but I'll do the scandisk/chkdisk and adware scans and see if that helps.

When I start windows with the new drive, it says the drive needs to be checked for consistency, and then it finds invalid allocation units in log files, size entires not valid, but nothing which appeared major.

Just wondering... if I tried booting from this drive in my other machine, and it booted up okay, wouldn't that imply that it was a hardware or driver problem with the other machine?

 

[montag451]

you would be lucky booting it up -
all drivers would be completely different inc chipset driver -
not sure if you could cause h/w prob [ie voltage prob], don't think so, but = ask mechbgon if you see him!!

do a hdd scan -
if you have a maxtor hdd lying around, then download maxblast from the maxtor website - it will check all the drives on your system, as long as there is a maxtor installed!

 

[Hork]

This is a maxtor, so I'll check out Maxblast.

I was thinking... I'm doing a scan using MS AntiSpyware Beta and it is finding some adware/spyware... but since the drive is a slave, it isn't going to check its registry for values, is it? That doesn't sound very thorough.

I'll also run AdAware and Spybot Search and Destroy.