How do I get the bluescreen of death to stay?

[BBCMember]

My computer keeps on rebooting when it gets to the Windows XP flash screen and only flashes the bluescreen for a second before it reboots. So, I can't read it. I can't get into Windows in either Normal Mode or Safe Mode. How to I set it so that the bluescreen will stay so I can see what is causing this.

Just so you know, I've already tried changing out the PSU. That's not the issue.

Please advise.

 

[MaverickBP]

Unfortuneately you can't make the bsod stay. Also it sucks you can't at least get into windows to attempt troubleshooting. Last time I got a bsod I snapped a picture of it with my camera and then pulled it up once I was back in windows and troubleshooted from there. You may be looking at a wipe/reinstall.

 

[ValuedCustomer]

if you have another machine see if you can mount the drive as a secondary and run diagnostics on the bad drive - you may just have a few bad sectors causing the bsod. chkdsk may take care that -- good luck

 

[BBCMember]

I tried booting up from the Windows CD and the C drive shows an "Unknown" file system, whereas the E drive (second partition of the same drive) shows NTFS as the file system.

Is it possible for one partition to go bad, and the other to be OK?

Also, I have been running chkdsk on the C partition via the Recovery Console of the Windows CD for the past 3 hours. It's been stuck at 75% for the past 45 minutes. Is that normal? The hard drive light is not on, nor is the CD light. Thoughts?

 

[btcomm1]

Yes it's possibly for one partition to go bad he other other one be ok. From the sounds of it you either should remove norton goback, or if you don't have norton goback you are going to have to see if you can't get any data back off of the drive then format and reinstall.

 

[BBCMember]

I used SpinRite on the drive, and hopefully it fixed it. I don't know because I checked both the boot drive and the slave drive to be scanned since they both died (most likely on account of a weak PSU). SpinRite is now running on the slave drive that is in the same system, and that has been running for about 35 hours just on that one drive. It has continued to say "15 hours/49.97% remaining" for the past 14 hours. Is it worth it to continue to wait, or should I just write this drive off? It's too bad if I have to write it off, because it's a 60GB drive that is pretty much at capacity with a lot of my data.

Another question is, if I should continue to repair this drive, if I were to stop SpinRite, do I have to manually edit it when I start SpinRite back up so that it will start where it left off, or will it do that automatically (when I initialized the scan, I checked the NON-edit mode)?

Also, is it OK to stop it when it is working on a defective region?

 

[BBCMember]

This answers one of my questions:

SpinRite was started on the Armstrong machine on November 2, 2006. SpinRite was stopped and started over the next few weeks. No luck. But we kept at it. On Thursday Nov 30, it reached 84.5080% but the machine would not start. Then on Tues, Dec 5th, when it reached 84.5212%, the machine booted normally. Woo Hoo. We were able to copy back the lost data. SpinRite ran for 33 days! My office was nice and toasty due to the extra machine that was running in it as well.

 

[sieistganzfett]

do we know for a fact that your hard drive is not failing though?

a failing hard drive can corrupt a partion and could also be why its taking so long and locking under various disk check/correction software on your hard drive. a failing hard drive causes bad sectors and a lot of corruption. that can explain the blue screens.

first check a hard drive with a even a quick diagnostic, made by the hard drive manufacturer when something like this happens since that usually takes less than 10 minutes a chkdsk typically takes an hour or so if the drive is "passing." if its a good drive, then worry about correcting the bad sectors. but definitely get anything off your drive ASAP if the drive comes up with a bad SMART status or is failing. if a hard drive is not failing. you can connect the drive to another pc and use windows debugger to !analyze -v the dump files to find out why its crashing. if you can't see the partition at all, its usually norton goback, but this case would be tough if that was on your pc (which it's not?) but you can see the partition, its just not recognized.

it really sounds like the partion is corrupt, and your software that would fix it is locking up because the drive is failing, which is the root of all your problems.

i would stop the attempt to correct sectors on the drive, and test it with a diagnostic. if it fails, the drive is trash after you get your data off. Do you even need data on the drive? if the drive is good and you don't need data, a low level format could make the drive useable again.

 

[BBCMember]

OK. Thanks. It did fix the boot drive. I just booted up. Will buy a new HD right away and get all of my data onto the new drive.

Btw, is it possible to have ATA and SATA drives connected to the same mobo running at the same time, or is it either/or?

 

[sieistganzfett]

yes you can at the same time. is your drive even failing though?

 

[Pwnbroker]

One question...will disk shadowing prevent such BSODs from happening?

 

[sieistganzfett]

No, disk shadowing provides multiple data sets of the same data. not using a computer prevents BSODs from happening, next best is to troubleshoot the bsod to find out how to fix it.
research.microsoft.com/~gray/papers/TandemTR88.5_DiskShadowing.doc