Blue screen; XP Restore CD

[styleisdead]

Please excuse my ignorance, but I really need some help.... I hope this is in the right area, if not, please let me know which area to re-post this thread. Thank You. Please excuse the length as I'm including everything that happened up to this point as I don't know what will be useful and what isn't.

My computer died about 8 months after I got it and sent it back to Compaq because it was still under warranty. They said the hard drive had gone bad and replaced it. When I came back, it was working fine, well, for about 2 months.

I had downloaded VLC Media player and was using it to play music, A had highlighted a few songs and right clicked open with VLC. VLC opened every song I had in my library at the same time in and each time it opened each song in a new player (expl; for each song it opened a new player to play the song)

This froze my computer and I had to hard boot. After the hard boot I went to blue screen.

After reading some forums, Most of the info said that other people who had this problem had burned out their RAM. So I changed my RAM. But While I was changing it out I upgraded it from 512MB X2 to 1GB x2. I did research on the RAM before I bought it and was told the new RAM was compatible.

After the new RAM was installed, The first thing I noticed was in the Bios It was still detecting 512MB X2. After that it go to the start-up menu (Start windows in safe mode; safe mode with networking, normally, etc.) I've tried all the options and it always goes to blue screen.

I downloaded a XP System Restore disk and tried booting from CD, it starts just fine but the goes to "Examining 238473 MB disk 0 at id 0 on bus 0 on nvatabus..." The hard drive is 250GB so that might be right, I'm not sure. But the BootCD just stops there...

Nothing Else...

What's the Problem??? What do I need to do? Please educate me...

Joel

 

[dokk2]

Seeing as how your system is not functioning ,,at the moment,,download the hdd's manufacturers software and zero the whole hdd,this will most certainly get rid of any likely problems,then use your original disks and reinstall everything,also the 512 might be the limit of your mobo that you will have to check out with compaq..
In any event reinstall with the original disk etc..Some OEM machines will take a generic installation and some will not allow anything but what they were sold with...

 

[styleisdead]

My Mother Board can hold up to 8GB (It has 4 slots and has to have at least 2 slots filled to work)

Compaq doesn't offer the XP Restore disk for download but they do offer it for sale by mail, So I'll try that.

Also, I just went and picked up some more RAM thinking that I just got bad RAM the last time and went back to the original that it came with, 512 X2 DDR2 4200 but that didn't work either.

So, I think It's either the hard drive or its a software problem.

 

[styleisdead]

Seems the problem was software...

I found an old and very slow 40GB Hard drive and added it to me computer, Loaded the XP Restore disk to the newly installed hard drive and it showed signs of life... At this point I thought it was a bad hard drive. So I started downloading the divers for the computer and updates. When I got to the Bios update it asked for a restart.

After restart, my old hard drive came back to life, like magic ... Not sure why or what update fixed the problem but it works now. So I'm happy.

Thanks for the help and because of the mistakes I now have 4gb of RAM and thats cool