BSOD on bootup (winxp home)

[neit]

Hi,

I'm having a problem with my winxp pc at home. I built it a while ago and all was well, but its been slowly degrading over time (2+ years). The floppy drive stopped working almost a year ago, but when i installed winxp home, it installed fine and just disabled the floppy. When i went to finally disconnect it physically, I now get a bsod after booting up windows. it progresses to the loading screen, and looks like it will boot up, but then it flashes a bsod. I lost my original winxp disk, but i did make a copy of it (it was an oem), but my copy has a corrupt firewire module (or whatever it is, eitherway, the disk is bad and i can't boot up to it).

I have a feeling that i have some faulty hardware going on, but booting to knoppix showed ram was fine (memtest 5 times). I also moved the harddrive to my slackware box and backed everything up, but i'm not sure how to determine if other components of the system are bad (other than buying other parts and testing that way, but i figure there are too many variables by that method). could this be just a windows error (since it does boot up mostly)? if so, can i get a friends windows cd to boot to and run repair tools (i have an oem version, what if they use corporate [i know i know, i'm trying to convince them to buy it], or retail)?

Thanks for any help, i've been messing with it with little success

 

[mechBgon]

Call Microsoft and ask to buy a new WinXP Home media, they do sell them for a reasonable price. Hehe, make their registration scheme work against them... "c'mon, I registered this and should be on file, look me up by name and let's get me a CD coming!"

Hope it all works out...

 

[MattM350]

See if you can get another copy from Microsoft, or see if you have a friend that can lend you their winxp cd to do a repair off of. Every now and again from the frequent installing/uninstalling of stuff windows becomes "unstable" and needs to be formatted. I would try to repair it first, but if that doesnt work try to format and reinstall it fresh. Hopefully the winxp repair will solve your problems though.

 

[sinisterDei]

Have you actually tried swapping the RAM out? I know you said RAMtest said the RAM was fine, but I don't trust any RAM tests, and 90% of the time I've seen an XP/2k install fail it was due to faulty or incompatible RAM.

Also, you can get Windows XP floppy boot disks if booting off the thing is the only problem you're having, http://winxp.bink.nu should provide a lot of help with that. I know your FDD is dead, but its easy to borrow one

 

[neit]

i'm waiting for a good xp cd from my friend, i'll try to the ram issue, but i don't have any compatible ram, i'll try too find some though. the computer has been giving me a big headache though, i'm thinking of caving in and getting a decked out nforce mobo (~$110) and some ddr memory and hope that it will work again.

ah well, i'll see how things go, thanks for the suggestions

 

[spie34]

Best piece of advice I can give you is to not lose your CD. And when you make backups make sure that they do work. Thats what I would do from now on. Then you wouldn't have this problem. Oh another thing that you can do is save one file in windows. look in tweakxp for the file that saves the registered file thing. I can't remember the name of it. That way you don't have to reactivate it. It will think that it is when you replace the file.