Multiple BSOD's at Startup

Multiple BSOD's at Startup
Hi, new user here...

Don't yell at me, I know I should have come looking for help awhile ago, but that's just how it is for a busy mom!

Basic specs Win XP Pro MCE SP3 Athlon X2 4200+ 2-512mb ram, onboard ATI graphics

Computer has been BSOD'ing off and on for a quite some time, but the errors are never consistant. Have tried to chase things down intermittanly, but as they are regularly different, haven't known what to do. I think the most common are 8E's IRQ not Less or Equal, but I think I've seen 'em all and I know they're getting worse. The two at boot up tonight after this weekend's fiasco were: PFN List Corrupt 0x4e and FLTMGR.SYS.

System BSOD'd a lot this past weekend, to the point of (can't find where I wrote it down) win/sys32 file missing or corrupt and ultimately just sitting a black screen (no beeps no hard drive sounds) upon pressing power on. (We gotten that a few times lately, but the second try always boots it, although it will frequently then BSOD.) BUT this time the black screen was a screeching halt, until I pulled the power cord, then pressed the power button til the green light at the back went out, and of course the %$$##^% thing booted and ran just fine. The kicker is once we get past a BSOD or 3, the system runs just fine, and I can stress the daylights out of it with photo editing or a boatload of IE windows at once. And I have eyeballed the motherboard and it doesn't appear to have cracked capacitors or damage.

Here are some other things that might help:

Used to have Norton AV quite a while back, but I know it made system buggy, so we uninstalled. I mention this because there was some goofy Norton reference in a BSOD this weekend, but honestly I didn't write it down in my frustration.

Have run chkdsk, doesn't seem to find anything.
Have run memtest, ditto - although I bet you folks will tell my the RAM is bad, and I suspect that too.

I don't seem to understand verifier.exe and I suspect there's a bad driver or two contributing.

Haven't had the system on enough to run a virus scan this week, but AVG has never found anything.

Have a teenage gamer -who knows what he's messed with or downloaded.

I've got about a gazillion minidumps if you want em.

I suspect I've got more than one thing going on that's led to this train wreck. Am willing to reinstall if you point me that direction, but the crashes at power-up make me nervous about going that route. Also, my cd/dvd drive won't read dvds (it's the primary) but have a 2nd dvd-rom drive. (I have both reinstall disks and the restore from partition setup) And while I have restore points, I honestly don't know where to try going back to or what my last known good config would be. I don't change things much, but suspect teen might.

Can't spend a lot to fix/replace, hubby lost job.

Sorry if post too long....

Ran Hijack This, here's the log - hope I did it right.

Should I run some sort of registry scan - don't know much about registry, but I'm guessing it's probably corrupted w/everthing going on!

Thanks in advance for help - please be patient w/me. I probably won't be back for a few days because of kids schedule!

 

Hi there dood1emom welcome to the forums, if you click on this link below and read and follow the instructions :


HOW TO: Debug Memory Dumps (Figure out what is causing a BSOD)

As always MG's ask you to follow all the instructions to the end, there are links for you to click on , may i point out also that i am not one of the Major Geeks but IMO you should try this first and also please be patient whilst trying this solution.

GOOD LUCK

 

Hi Guys,

Too busy w/kids this summer - never got back to anyone about my multiple bsod problems. Very frustrating - never same bsod, minidumps pointed us in several directions. Still think it was a RAM problem of some sort, but am memtests showed good.

But FYI, this apparently has solved the problem - I have only had one BSOD (my system does hate heat, so I think it was a fluke in warm weather) after we popped out the hard drive (it's an HP so had to pull it to get to ram sticks) and removed and reinserted the ram sticks, the @#%$% thing has worked fine for several weeks now!

The funny this is we had an acquaintance go thru multiple weird crashes & reboots too. Once we told her to reinsert the ram sticks, hers is apparently stable now too?!?

dood1emom