Problem with a Compaq Armada 4130T. Will not boot windows!

[BPiersol]

I have an old pentium 133 laptop that is giving me fatal exeption errors on boot. It is not the cmos battery, hdd, or the ram. I have tried other pieces, and it still gives me the same errors on boot. I can see the Win 98 splash screen, but it errors out after that screen. I have tried 3 hard drives, tried removing the ram (one stick at a time) and also removing the cmos battery. It is the same every time. Her eis the error I get:

An exception OE has occured at 0028:C0058802 in VxD SHELL (01) + 000001C6. This was called from 0028:C000BAFC in VxD VMM(01) + 0000AAFC. It may be possible to continue normally.

* Press any key to attempt to continue.
* Press CTRL+ALT+DEL to restart your computer. You will lose any unsaved information in all applications.

Press any key to continue


I really have no idea what is wrong here. I tried a different HDD, I even formatted the HDD and re- installed windows (on a different laptop). When I tried to install windows on this hard drive, I got an error and setup closed. Anybody have any ideas?

 

[Lord Evermore]

Your sig is b0rken.

Did you try with a different CPU? Any self-respecting geek has a P133 or similar laying around.

If it has a floppy drive, can you boot to that?

It may be some other integrated component on the mainboard, and unfortunately it will be nearly impossible for you to tell what it is. You can try disabling everything in the BIOS that you can, but laptop BIOSes don't have much. Maybe LAN, sound, secondary IDE port. It could be a bad capacitor on the mainboard or a broken resistor, something you'd have to tear the system apart to find, if you knew what you were looking for.

Have you tried booting to safe mode?

Did you change the drive cable? Did you try completely different memory modules?

I see this problem quite often as a field tech. It's almost always due to a hard drive either failing or corrupted due to power loss or system crash. Obviously the drive itself isn't your issue.

It might also be the power supply brick or the distribution point in the laptop.