Computer Help - Blue Screen of Death

[Joe Pelonio]

My wife's laptop, which she needs for embroidery software, has decided to die. The blue screen goes away so fast you cannot read it, so I managed to take a picture with a good fast digital camera and that wasn't easy.

For background, it's HP Pavillion zd7000, always had an overheating problem which we solved by keeping it raised up. About 2 years ago on boot we started getting an error message that the hard drive would go out soon so I replaced it and it's been fine ever since, until today. After this message (below) it displays the screen where you can choose safe mode or regular etc., then reboots to the blue screen and all over again.

No one is open today, but is this thing even worth fixing? It's bad memory or another bad hard drive it could be pretty cheap to fix , but the 2+ days to re-install everything may be better done for a new one?

We do have a place that doesn't charge for diagnosis and gives a free quote, for tomorrow.

[Jerome Stanek]

Try starting the laptop in safe mode. When you turn it on start hitting the F8 key to gt it to show the option for safe mode.

[Joe Pelonio]

Try starting the laptop in safe mode. When you turn it on start hitting the F8 key to gt it to show the option for safe mode.
Didn't work, it will not go into safe mode, but instead goes back to the same loop it did when I selected regular startup. I also tried F1 to get it to change the startup drive order to boot from the original windows xp CD and that too does the same loop to the blue screen.

[Mike Olson]

Shut down the laptop and unplug everything. any external keyboard, any mice, any wireless adapters, everything.

Remove the battery too. Plug in ONLY the AC power and turn it back on. see what happens. if it boots up, then shut down and plug one thing in. power on to see if it gets the bluescreen. what ever gives the bluescreen is causing the problem.

We used to get this at work when modem cables went bad.

[Art Mulder]

Shut down the laptop and unplug everything. any external keyboard, any mice, any wireless adapters, everything.

Remove the battery too. Plug in ONLY the AC power and turn it back on. see what happens. if it boots up, then shut down and plug one thing in. power on to see if it gets the bluescreen. what ever gives the bluescreen is causing the problem.

We used to get this at work when modem cables went bad.

To add to Mike's suggestions
- make sure you LEAVE it turned off for at least 1-2 minutes to make sure it is totally off. (We used to have Power Supplies at work that would get "confused" after a power bump. Just unplugging-and-replugging would do nothing, but unplugging for 1-2 minutes would let the capacitors discharge so that it was totally off.

- also I would check and reseat the RAM as well as all cable connections (internal also)

- Can you boot to the bios and check the fan speed and/or CPU temperature?

[Stephen Tashiro]

You can download and burn various CDs that will boot the computer to something simpler than Windows.

A bootable CD that will test memory is memtest86:
http://www.memtest86.com/download.html

The major hard drive manufacturers have bootable CDs you can download that will boot the computer and run diagnostic tests on their hard drives.

There are several "rescue CDs" ( such as systemRescueCd: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page) that boot the computer into Linux. You might not want to delve into Linux, but booting with one of these rescue CDs may give you a better error message. Someone else might interpret it if you post it.

The above Cds are good way to determine if you have a hardware problem or whether you have a problem with Windows itself, such as a corrupted system file.

[Aaron Hastings]

What the others have said.

Power down. Remove power source. Take out the RAM, battery, hard drive. Replace them and power up.

The only time time didn't work for me was when my hard drive fried.

[Darius Ferlas]

Stop 0x00000024 (from the photo of the blue screen) indicates that there is a problem with the file system. In practice it means that it could be either the HD or a little mishmash in the integrity of the NTFS system. The values in the parenthesis indicate the addresses (or location on the HD) where the problem occurred. Useful if you run low level repair utilities or debugging. Useless for most home users. With this type of error taking the disk out and putting it back in won't do much good. The blue screen will come back like a charm.

While there certainly can be a memory issue with this machine, those are usually flagged by 0x0000000A and 0x0000001E stop codes and the error on the screen shot is not pointing to memory chips.

I would then start working on the premise that the problem is with the file system.

Possible solutions:

1. plop this drive as a slave/external drive to a different computer and see if it can be read at all. If so then do:

a)

START/RUN/cmd
click OK
type defrag x: (where x is the letter assigned to that drive)

If it crashes the drive is shot. Try to back up (if possible) whatever data is not backed up.

If it doesn't crash then do:

b)

START/RUN/cmd
click OK
type chkdsk /r

If it tells you the drive needs to be dismounted say yes.


After that put the disk back in the original machine and see if it boots.

2. If above doesn't do any good but the disk could be read then plop it back into the other PC to get hold of the data files you may want to keep (if no backup exists).

Reinstall Windows on the same disk if it did not crash in step 1a. Otherwise buy a new disk.

[Joe Pelonio]

OK, that's a lot of ideas to try, I'll get on it.

[Don Alexander]

if you have a windows XP CD you can boot to the CD and let it run till it gets to the part where you have to choose whther to format your harddrive or run repair console choose repair/recovery console it will ask which windows install to boot to usually this is 1 then it brings you to c: prompt where you type in the following command "fixboot" and hit enter it will ask you if you really want to run it type "yes" hit enter takes just a few seconds then type in "fixmbr" again hit enter and confirm you really want to run it by typing "yes" hit enter again and it will take a few more seconds to run this command when that is completed remove the CD and type "exit" hit enter and the machine will reboot if it worked it will boot into windows like normal

obviously this willnot work if hardware is the issue, but its fairly quick, relatively easy and the most common non hardware boot issue is a corrupted boot file when it works you look like a genius when it doesn't you can just claim that you aren't a computer tech :D

[Joe Pelonio]

I pulled out the battery, power, network and USB plugs. Waited five minutes. Put only the power plug back in and got the same blue screen as before. Unlugged it again, removed the RAM, waited another 5 minutes, re-installed the RAM, plugged in, got same blue screen. Unplugged again, re-installed the original hard drive from 2 years ago, got the error message that the heard drive would fail soon, hit enter, got the windows logo, and the little bar graph showing that it is starting up, but stayed there (so far 15 minutes, appears to be hung up).

[Bill Cunningham]

Had that same problem on my main computer in May.. Turned out the HD was bad, the computer shop managed to transfer all my user folders and files to a new drive, (minor panic was setting in before that point, cuz I didn't have a recent backup) so I bought two drives and had them install just windows on the main one, and make the other new one with all my files a slave so I could filter my files back to the main drive.. Now, I can backup to my second HD at the end of every day, and transfer to my portable hd backup drive once a week. Of course I had to re-install everything, a real pain, but on the bright side, I got rid of a lot of junque I didn't need anymore, but was hording it anyway..just in case yaknow..

[Joe Pelonio]

I just got a call, the repair guy has it finished but I can't get there until tomorrow since they are 1/2 hour away and close in 10 minutes.:o

Turns out that all hardware was fine. They ran diagnostics and found some corruption of some system files that they were able to restore without losing any program or data files. Cost is $140, worth it I'd say, my wife would probably have been happy to pay $200!:D