unknown Hard Error

Hi,
Someone I've been helping with an old laptop, which recently had a wifi card configured, took it to a public library to try out the connection and didn't realize he had to stick the card in the slot. While he was waiting for the computer to find a connection, he decided to install AOL 7.0, got frustrated and shut down the computer in the middle of the installation. After that, it would run a chkdsk, start Windows, get a blip of blue screen and start over, landing at the safe mode menus. It couldn't enter any menu.

I put an XP installation CD in and got to the Recovery Console and was able to get the computer back up to the desktop. Tried a repair of the OS, but during bootup, if chkdsk is run, the following error occurs: c00000021a unknown Hard Error. If chkdsk is skipped, the computer can get to the desktop and run programs, but it's not possible to turn off programs, like in the Task Manager. I reset the comp not to reboot automatically and got the blue screen error below:

Error on blue screen:

disable or remove any newly installed hardware or software
Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing

STOP: 0x00000077 (0xc000000E, 0xC000000E, 0x00000000, 0x6152B000)

KERNEL-STACK-INPAGE-ERROR

Comp specs:
Sony Vaio Laptop - 512 mb RAM (max)
Windows XP Home SP2
new wifi card - D-Link Air / DWL-650 2.4 GHz Wireless Cardbus Adapter

Thanks for any help on this.

 

Thanks plodr,
The computer boots up with a borrowed XP cd to normal mode (and therefore probably safe mode as well). I'm still waiting for the computer's own set of cd's to catch up with it. It's an odd problem, because it will now boot up and is functional as long as you tell it to skip the chkdsk during the bootup sequence. I'll try booting up with the wifi card and seeing what happens with AOL 7.
It'll be awhile, but I'll try to get back to you about this.