OH BOY I NEED SOME HELP!

[gittyup]

OK. I am back. I have a friend's PC that I am trying to figure out. I have unplugged the floppy, zip drive, modem, CD-Rom and ethernet card. When I turn on the PC it boots up and it jumps into a blue screen with some type of error exception that gives a memory address. I did see the letters "VXD" on the same page. I hit OK and the same blue screen comes back a few more times. It finally goes back to the main screen and the PC then locks up. Since I unplugged all the stuff above, I have narrowed it down to the operating system , power supply, mother board, processor or hard drive. I already know the mother board has a bad memory slot and am thinking that it is probably going bad. I believe it is a Amptron mother board that has the video, audio, and ethernet built in. Before I go out an get a new MB,CPU,HD, anything I should try to make sure? Thanks.

 

[ku]

sounds like there is an issue with your RAM... try another stick.

 

[gittyup]

I have 2 brand new sticks of 256MB PC133 Micron memory sticks that I have tried both in.

 

[gittyup]

Here is the actual error message on the blue screen:

A fatal exception 06 has occurred at 0028:C02A3062 in VXD VWIN32(05) + 00001B8A The current application will be terminated.

 

[Woody419]

What's the OS?
Try a boot to DOS with a startup disk. If it boots the cpu and memory and ps should be fine. This can be done with the hdd unplugged.
Plug in the hdd, boot to DOS with floppy, OK?
You can try installing Windows on top of it self, or if no go, from DOS - rename windows folder to OLDWindows then reinstall.

 

[gittyup]

Woody419

Win98SE

1)I unplugged the HD, stuck in a WIN98 boot disk and it booted to the floppy.

2)Plugged in the HD, stuck in the Win98 boot disk and it booted to windows where a blue screen came up.

 

[Woody419]

Set the BIOS to boot from the Boot disk first, either the floppy or cd-rom, there is no blue screen of death in DOS.
This checks to see if the hdd is causing the startup problems.

 

[gittyup]

Which F key gets me into the BIOS?

 

[smp]

On most motherboards it's delete.. it should say something like "press # key to enter setup" or something when you boot it up. You tried both sticks of ram seperately ..?? ie, one at a time and you got the same problems?

 

[gittyup]

You tried both sticks of ram seperately ..?? ie, one at a time and you got the same problems?

Yes, seperately.

 

[gittyup]

Set the BIOS to boot from the Boot disk first, either the floppy or cd-rom, there is no blue screen of death in DOS.
This checks to see if the hdd is causing the startup problems.

Edited the BIOS to boot to floppy and then cd-rom. It is now booting to the boot disk.

 

[Woody419]

Booting from boot disk is good. At the prompt type c: then the enter key, then type dir, then enter key, you should get the entire c drive listed real fast. Its reading the c drive, hdd is ok, Windows is probably corrupted. With the Amptron mother board that has the video, audio, and ethernet built in you will have trouble getting drivers. One of the drivers may be corrupted and causing the vxd error.

Got the Amptron disk?

 

[gittyup]

Got the Amptron disk?

No.


The person just informed there was no data on the box that was important. So, I decided to bootup with the 4 WIN2K disks and then try to load WIN2K Pro. I went thru those disks and did the "format C: using NTFS." it then started copying files and now I got a blue screen "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" during the WIN2K setup.

 

[Woody419]

Thats out of my league, I have never messed with 2k. Seems iffy trying to load 2k on a proprietary mb with integrated video, sound, etc. If you have an old VGA video card, put it in and try Win98SE. But without the correct Amptron disk you may be hosed. Look here for the board.

 

[smp]

Bad ram.

The same thing was happening to me for a while.. the ram seemed to work (ie, machine would boot up etc) and 98SE worked fine.. but then I couldn't get win2k to work on it. Put in my stick of ram (this was a friend's computer) and it worked right away. Flakey ram is a terrible problem to troubleshoot.
Of course, I could be wrong, it might be something else that flaked out.

edit: I know you tried both sticks seperately, and I'm sure they both work enough to boot up and like do some things, but one of them isn't working properly. Try the install with one, then the other stick of ram, better yet, grab a friend's stick that you know is good. This all IMO of course.