Plethora of Problems with Dell Bootup

(posted this in Software because I'm pretty sure that's where the problem is.)

Hello Major Geeks,

I have had a series of problems with my son's laptop which has left me unsure of what step to take next. I would appreciate your input.

My 13-year-old son brought his laptop to me-- Dell Latitude C600 with Windows xp--, complaining that the battery wasn't holding a charge. We discovered that his pet guinea pig had chewed on the power supply (the 20V side). The battery was working fine, but the pc was only receiving power from the wall intermittently, depending on whether the frayed ends of the power cord were making contact.
I took it to the shop and bought a new power supply and it booted up fine. I took it home, plugged it in and booted it up so all of the updates could run.

(FYI, his computer has AVG free which is set up to scan and update automatically. Also Malwarebytes and Advanced System Care Pro, which I will run every two weeks or so. Last weekend, I did find a Trojan. I can't remember which program found it. I kept the log, but I can't get to it right now.)

I posted all of this about the power supply because of the possibility that the pc may have been receiving odd and intermittent amounts of voltage. I don't know whether that might be a factor in the problems I'm describing below.

The next day, he brought the laptop home from school and told me that it would not boot up at all. So, here we go:

1. The pc boots as far as the Windows screen and freezes. No blue caterpillar progress bar and no Blue Screen of Death.

2. The pc will not boot in any of the Safe Modes, or "Last Known Good..."
When booting in Safe Mode, it will load a bunch of drivers, perhaps as many as 30, and then stop dead. No cursor or anything.
(It always stops after "multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\windows\system32\DRIVERS\agp440.sys", if that helps.)

3. When I booted from the Windows CD, it got as far as "Starting Windows" and froze. I tried this three times always with that same result.

4. I tried to boot with an Avira Rescue CD I downloaded from their site. It got as far as "Booting Kernel" and froze. On the Avira Support Forum, I found that a few other people had experienced that same problem. Avira's suggestion was to try burning another copy. I haven't gone any further with that yet because:

5. When I tried again with the Windows CD, I finally got a B.S.O.D. with Stop:0x000000A5 (0x00000002, 0x823EAEE0, 0xE10026A8, 0x823EAEE0)
Meaning that the BIOS is not fully ACPI compliant. Windows suggested getting a proper BIOS from Dell, or turning off ACPI by hitting F7 when prompted to install third-party drivers. So, it appears to be a BIOS problem.

The BSOD also suggested, "if this is the first time you have seen this message, try restarting your computer normally." Since it was, I did, but got the same old problems.
I tried turning off ACPI with F7, but got the same problems as before: "Starting Windows" and nothing further. Maybe I didn't do it right. I only tried once, I've never done it before so I was feeling a little hesitant. Maybe I didn't hit F7 with enough authority.

6. I went to Dell's site and found the BIOS for the C600, but I haven't done anything with it yet. I'm not sure exactly what to do. Will it work if I burn it to a CD and put it in the laptop?

7. As I was writing this, I tried to boot from the Windows disk and right now, the pc is sitting on that same BSOD I mentioned above.

And that's where I'm at right now. My next step was to post this thread and get some advice on what my next step should be. I would appreciate your input.


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F7 is used during a fresh instal of XP. You cannot change a HAL.dll once it is installed.

This looks like a hardware problem. You may be able to disable agp440.sys using recovery console and see if XP then allows you to boot into safe mode.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324764

Before you do this though, download Puppy linux. Burn the iso file with Imgburn and boot the CD. Does Puppy complete the boot?

How to write an image file to a disc using ImgBurn

Edit: Burn the disk at 4x.

 

Thanks, tgell for the prompt reply.
As is often the case, the main problem was something totally different that I had overlooked. I just noticed that the wireless notebook card had gotten hit on something and was loose and rattling around. When I pulled the card out, the computer booted normally.
There may be other problems, but at least it boots up and looks okay so far.

This thread should probably be closed since it doesn't contain any information useful to anyone, except an object lesson to look at what's right in front of you before you go messing around inside.