Blue Screen of Death even with new hard drive

[zavulon]

Hi all,

I'm trying to help my friend with his Dell Dimension e520. About 5 minutes after the startup (Windows XP), it goes into BSOD (0x0000007B message). His hard drive is hopelessly lost to the world after about 3 years of never updating windows, not running any antivirus, no firewall - you can imagine. So he got a new hard drive and decided to start from scratch. Here's where it gets weird.

When I completely disconnect the old hard drive, and put the new (empty, just bought) hard drive in, and boot from Windows XP CD.. the same BSOD happens, about five minutes after start of Windows Setup process!

My first thought was that it's a hardware issue - BUT: when I reconnected the old hard drive (and disconnected the new one), I can load Windows XP in safe mode, and it runs ok for hours, without ever encountering the BSOD.

I'm going to his house tonight, and going to try to flash the bios (which will be tricky because he has no floppy drive).. but am I missing something? Anybody has any clues?

Thank you!!!!

 

[Flakes]

if it runs in safe mode it is most likely a Driver issue, uninstall all drivers and update them....

if it used to bluescreen in safe mode its more likely RAM, run memtest http://www.memtest.org/ (let it run for about 2 hours, if it finds ANY errors, replace the RAM)

its still a good idea to format the machine and start afresh, i can only imagine what you will find if you dont.

you could always try a windows recovery, using the XP disk.

actually scrap that last one... the BSOD happens in windows setup when booted off the disk? then it could be the disk...im gonna place my bet on faulty memory though.

 

[zavulon]

Thank you!

I solved the issue.. it was the BIOS. I updated the BIOS using Ubuntu live disk and Windows installed fine.