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HELP! XP Blue Screens

B

barmstrong

Senior member
A couple of days ago, without doing anything to the computer, I started to get XP Stop Errors. I would reboot the machine and would get a message saying that NTFS.sys was corrupt or missing and needed to be replaced. Booted into the recovery console and ran fixboot, fixmbr, then ran chkdsk /r. After chkdsk ran, it said that it found erros and corrected them. So I figured the hard drive was dying. I couldn't reinstall XP even after a format, kept getting stop errors. So I switched out my hard drive with a new one and I am still having the same problem. The last stop error that I received said something about memory management. Anyone have any idea what would be causing these problems? I hadn't had a problem in a few months. Is my RAM going bad? Is there a problem with the XP cd that I'm installing off of?

The system:
Windows XP Pro
ASUS P4B266C BIOS 1004
2 x 256 Crucial DDR
P4 1.6a

Tomorrow if I don't have a better idea of what is going on, I'll take everything out of the comp cept the video card and a new stick of RAM and install off a different XP cd.

Thanks!
 
It certainly sounds like a bad stick of RAM could be the culprit, especially since the problems only developed recently. Try reinstalling with only one stick at a time to see if you can narrow your problem down.
 
what would cause RAM to go bad? both sticks were 256 Meg Crucial PC2100 CL2.5. I was running the FSB at 133 so they were within spec but I was running them with aggressive timings. A couple months ago I tried to boot at 150 FSB but it wouldn't post so I've been running at 133 ever since.

If it turns out one of them or both failed, is there a test that I can run to test them to see which is bad so that I can return them?

Thanks, installing xp now.
 
Glad you worked things out. There are memory tester programs out there, but I recall people saying that they're pretty unreliable. Never tried one myself. Dedicated PC shops use hardware testers, which cost mucho $$$. Easiest way to test is run with only one stick at a time and see which one causes the errors. As for why they go bad in the first place, I'd guess it's just wear and tear, but I'm certainly no electrical engineer...
 
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