Laptop BSOD, beeps, crashing.

[Shephard]

I am trying to troubleshoot this Toshiba laptop but I cannot seem to find the problem.

It's a friends and a few days ago he said when he booted the computer it started beeping and he couldn't get past the Toshiba post screen.

Second boot he made it past post. He had the options of 'Launch Startup Repair' or start normally. Startup repair took more than half an hour and said no problems were found. He had an option to system restore and he did. He got to Windows but it crashed after using the computer a while.

I took the computer and looked at it.

I only got a 'beep' one time. It was a very loud and long beep. I read it could be a graphics failure.

I did make it to Windows one time before opening it up. I checked the hard drive and it was ok.

I reseated the memory, thinking it might have gotten loose.

I ripped open the entire laptop and cleaned it well then put it back together.

Now on startup I just get a totally black screen but can hear the computer fan.

If I restart sometimes I get stuck at post. Sometimes I make it to choose load Windows or Launch Startup repair. Two errors I have gotten...

- BSOD the first time
- STOP: 0xC0000221 unknown hard error C:\Winnt\System32\Ntdll.dll the second time

Now finally I am in Windows after a few restarts. I am going to leave it running for now and see what happens.

Amd-e-240
3gb ram
Windows 7

Any ideas?

edit * after maybe 5 minutes in Windows it said Windows Explorer is restarting. Then the screen cut out and then BSOD appeared and it restarted.

 

[mfenn]

0xC0000221 is a device driver checksum mismatch. Usually this means that some driver has been corrupted when reading from disk. Since it happens intermittently for you, my two bets are:

1. The HDD is marginal, it sometimes reads the sector correctly and sometimes doesn't.
2. The memory is marginal, and sometimes flips bits as the driver is being loaded.

How many DIMMs do you have? Are they all removable? If you have at least two DIMMs and all the memory is removable, you could try running with just one and then the other.

 

[Shephard]

It's two 2 DIMMs - One 2GB, one 1GB. I reseated them and so far no problems. Booted on the first try.

The thing is my friend never touched them before. He doesn't know anything about computers so they would have never been removed in the first place.

I don't see how they could have gotten loose because the snaps in there are very tight.

I had it running for 10 minutes and did some Youtube, then restarted it just now.

Going to see if anything happens.