Unfocused
Companion Cube
- Joined
- Feb 22, 2004
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My aunt asked me to help her with her old laptop which bluescreened while she was using it and then bluescreened each time she tried to boot it (also in safe mode).
Since the error was "STOP: 218 {registry file failure}" I popped in a WinXP CD I had at home, did a chkdsk and then performed the steps listed on Microsoft's website here. The system booted succesfully, but Windows wouldn't let me log in in normal mode, because it was bothering me about some sort of need to activate for some reason and since I didn't have the CD it was installed from, didn't want to call Microsoft and wasn't even sure if the system was legal, I just accessed the system in safe mode. My mission: move all the files from "My Documents" to an external drive.
On my first attempt, as soon as I clicked on the folder, the system did a BSOD, ran chkdsk and logged into Windows. This time, I was able to access My Documents, but when I tried to copy all of the files, I got some sort of error that a file is not available/can't be read/something to that effect. So I selected the first few folders and managed to copy them to the external drive. When I selected the next group of folders, after a few minutes I got a BSOD and now I can't boot the system at all - it tries to do a chkdsk and either freezes, BSODs by itself, or BSODs after I skip the chkdsk.
I used Ultimate Boot CD and ran two HDD diagnostic programs, both of which say the HDD is fine (then why couldn't it copy some files and BSODed while copying others :?).
Now I'm running Memtest86 and I'm getting a wall of errors. It says the laptop has 503MB of memory and during the test, the memory started failing at ~256MB, it's now at 318MB (15 minutes later), and registered 3.6 million errors already. So probably the second RAM stick is borked. But if that is the case, why did the laptop act as if that was a HDD failure, corrupting the page file and having problems copying files? Or is it perhaps a coincidence, that the system went corrupt and now the RAM stick died?
Does anyone have an idea of what might be going on here?
Since the error was "STOP: 218 {registry file failure}" I popped in a WinXP CD I had at home, did a chkdsk and then performed the steps listed on Microsoft's website here. The system booted succesfully, but Windows wouldn't let me log in in normal mode, because it was bothering me about some sort of need to activate for some reason and since I didn't have the CD it was installed from, didn't want to call Microsoft and wasn't even sure if the system was legal, I just accessed the system in safe mode. My mission: move all the files from "My Documents" to an external drive.
On my first attempt, as soon as I clicked on the folder, the system did a BSOD, ran chkdsk and logged into Windows. This time, I was able to access My Documents, but when I tried to copy all of the files, I got some sort of error that a file is not available/can't be read/something to that effect. So I selected the first few folders and managed to copy them to the external drive. When I selected the next group of folders, after a few minutes I got a BSOD and now I can't boot the system at all - it tries to do a chkdsk and either freezes, BSODs by itself, or BSODs after I skip the chkdsk.
I used Ultimate Boot CD and ran two HDD diagnostic programs, both of which say the HDD is fine (then why couldn't it copy some files and BSODed while copying others :?).
Now I'm running Memtest86 and I'm getting a wall of errors. It says the laptop has 503MB of memory and during the test, the memory started failing at ~256MB, it's now at 318MB (15 minutes later), and registered 3.6 million errors already. So probably the second RAM stick is borked. But if that is the case, why did the laptop act as if that was a HDD failure, corrupting the page file and having problems copying files? Or is it perhaps a coincidence, that the system went corrupt and now the RAM stick died?
Does anyone have an idea of what might be going on here?