Every other boot attempt consistently fails

[barryng]

Page_fault_in_nonpaged_area Help!!!!

My parents are using an 866 MHz PIII Gateway with mininal software loaded. The system originally came with W95 and was eventually upgraded to W98SE. About a month ago I upgraded W98SE to Win XP and put in 256MB memory. The machine seemed to work fine until last week.

It now crashes on the first boot try with a bsod indicating "Page_fault_in_nonpaged_area". Strangely, it consistently successfully restarts from this error but the next boot attempt starts the cycle all over again. In other words, every other boot attempt consistently brings the bsod and page_fault..... error.

I reloaded XP and changed to the NTFS file system. Even with a fresh installation this problem persists unchanged leading me to suspect a hardware problem but I cannot rationalize why this only occurs every other time I try to start windows XP.

Any thoughts or suggestions would be appreciated as short of just starting to substitue different hardware (graphics card, modem, etc.) I am out of ideas.

 

[rky60]

Try just removin that stick of RAM, or reseating it?

 

[barryng]

I eventually discovered what was causing the problem. We had a 128MB Lexar JumpDrive "permanently" left in one of the USB ports that was used as a backup location for Quicken data. As soon as I removed it, the problem resolved itself. I tried another USB memory device I had and it too caused a problem. If I plugged them in after the machine was already booted, they would momentarily appear in Windows Explorer but then almost immediately dissappear. I am suspecting a bad mother board but I really do not know for sure. I am probably going to use an old zip drive for backing up Quicken and not replace the mobo as this machine seems to work ok in all other respects including driving a USB printer.

 

[Insidious]

Before you buy anything, try installing SP2 (or even SP1) I think there was a change made concerning USB.

-Sid