Need assistance with the blue screen of death.

[sonarchem]

The PC is running WinXP, don’t know which service pack.
When you turn on the Dell Dimension 8400 PC it begins to load Windows. You see the Win XP logo and progress bar. Then comes the blue screen with this error…
0x00000050 Page_Fault_In_Non-Paged_Area Error

The PC will not boot into Safe Mode. I have booted to the Win CD and started the Recovery Console, then went to command prompt and ran chkdsk. It did find and repair some errors (took 2 hrs). But did not fix the problem, still get the blue screen.

 

[ch33zw1z]

You need to run diags on the hdd, and also run memtest86+ for 12-24 hours. This will rule out the most likely suspects, hdd and RAM. If everything comes back clean, it may be a software issue....ie virus, spyware, etc..

 

[Nothinman]

There was also that patch MS released a few weeks ago that was randomly causing people's machines to BSOD on startup but I can't remember which STOP code it gave or the KB number right now.

 

[sonarchem]

The PC will not boot into Safe Mode. I have booted to the Win CD and started the Recovery Console, then went to command prompt and ran chkdsk. It did find and repair some errors (took 2 hrs). But did not fix the problem, still get the blue screen.
I have tried removing each of the 2 sticks of RAM one by one to see if that was the problem and still got the blue screen.
Hit F12 and went to hard drive diagnostics and that passed.

Tried “boot to utility partition”, then ran (express test) and (sympton tree-cannot boot the OS). Found no problems. But still get blue screen.
So does this mean it is probably a virus?
Thanks

 

[Gamingphreek]

Well PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON-PAGED_AREA means that the problem is isolated to the RAM or HDD (Assuming swap space is mapped the Virtual Page Table).

If you have eliminated the possibility that an update caused this error, try running memtest86+. There is no need to run it for any significant time - if there is a problem memtest will find it on the MOV tests in the first or second pass. It will be pretty apparent.

Try booting into a LiveCD Linux (Ubuntu) and see what happens there.

It is POSSIBLE this is a virus; however, it is unlikely.

-Kevin

(Oh and for God's sake get rid of XP and switch to Vista/7)

 

[Nothinman]

Well PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON-PAGED_AREA means that the problem is isolated to the RAM or HDD (Assuming swap space is mapped the Virtual Page Table).

If you have eliminated the possibility that an update caused this error, try running memtest86+. There is no need to run it for any significant time - if there is a problem memtest will find it on the MOV tests in the first or second pass. It will be pretty apparent.

Try booting into a LiveCD Linux (Ubuntu) and see what happens there.

It is POSSIBLE this is a virus; however, it is unlikely.

-Kevin

(Oh and for God's sake get rid of XP and switch to Vista/7)

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON-PAGED_AREA is a generic STOP code akin to an "illegal exception" in Win9x or segfault in Linux. I'd look at drivers before hardware.

But I'd say that it's more likely that one update that MS put out a few weeks ago that caused a lot of people BSODs but I can't remember the KB number.

 

[sonarchem]

I was able to fix it by doing a XP Repair Install with the Windows Recovery Console.
Thank you for the replies.