XP Home - Multiple Problems

I'm trying to help my son, so I may not have all necessary details. He has a Dell Dimension 3000 desktop. A couple of weeks ago, he connected a digital camera to download some pictures, and it apparently tried to install some picture management software to his computer at that time. He was apparently able to stop the installation, but then had to reboot the computer. Once he did, it would not complete the boot process. He now gets a BSOD with error 0x000000D1 with a reference to the IDE driver - ATAPI.sys. He can't boot into safe mode, command prompt, or any other mode.

He finally decided to do a complete system rebuild. He inserted the XP disk, changed his bios to boot from CD, and restarted. The cd drive reads the cd, begins the install process, and then fails with a message that essentially says the vga.sys file is corrupt.

Now....if that file is being read from the cd, then it can only be corrupt if 1) it was corrupt when the cd was burned, or 2) the cd has been physically damaged. It's the original xp cd that came with the PC, and I believe that's the first time it has ever been used, and there is no sign whatsoever of physical damage. I think there are some software problems with the system causing all of these issues, but I can't figure out how to clear them up.

Additionally, this computer doesn't have a floppy drive, so I'm at a loss as to how to even update the bios or start an XP repair via some method other than booting from cd. Any help would certainly be much appreciated!

 

just for the heck of it have him go to the manufacture of his hard drives' site and get their diagnostics and run them on the HDD.

 

also, it may be corrupted video card drivers, if he has been trying to do a repair instead of a complete format and reload, then the corrupt video drivers would still be a problem.
or it could be a failing cd drive

 

Any ideas as to how to run any sort of diagnostics or any other tools at this point? PC won't boot, no floppy drive, can't do xp repair from cd due to error msg noted above. I feel pretty stuck for options at this point.

 

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Memtest86_d4226.html

I'd suspect the ram too. You can make a CD with this tool.

 

Lets gather some more information folks.
Firstly by the "XP CD" do you mean the Dell maroon OS Recovery disk or do you mean some other bronze Microsoft XP Disk?
The Dell Cd contains a custom version and includes the folder $OEM$ in the root which contains ATAPI.sys and some custom Dell cabinet files and instructions. You can read these on another pc.
Whichever the CD may be dirty, try cleaning it.
Have you tried the install yourself and can you confirm Xero's point are you trying repair install, which does not always work, or a clean install which will with good components.
Secondly was the photo driver the only thing attempted/wrong before failure?

Thirdly Microsoft say that stop error 000000D1 is due to corrupt driver usualy following a failed installation. Your situation I believe, Sir. their preferred solution is to remove the offending driver(s), if you can identify them. This would be tricky in the extreme if your only resource is the Dell disk, as OEM versions do not have repair console available. Can you connect th hard drive to another pc as a slave.? You may want to do this anyway to save any data.

Studio T

 

I guess we will have to see what happens. Under no circumstance should an XP CD or a Recovery CD err out on other drivers, unless that media was damaged, or there was a hardware problem. (Often times, Dell reinstall CDs may have different labels, but are vanilla OEM XP).

Everyone jumped the gun on this one, for sure, including me, but I think they are on the right track. After a while, you start seeing a pattern with stop errors and symptoms on certain drivers, and get a feel for what is hardware failure, and what is not.

Time will tell, of course.

 

Thanks for the responses so far. I'm not sure if it's an oem disk or the Microsoft bronze disk, but I'll check with him. And I'm nowhere near convinced that the stop error truly reflects a problem with the atapi.sys driver, simply because the cd drive will read the xp disk....at least up to a point. If that driver were really broken, I can't see the cd drive being any more readable than the hard drive.

As to the install. He did clean the cd, but the results were the same. And while it started the boot/install process, it fails before it ever gets to the option for clean install vs repair install.

I will try to make a cd with the noted tool. Short of that working, I suspect I'll pack up my desktop and haul it the 150 miles that separates, and either plug his hd into my pc, or hook my floppy up to his pc and boot with a win98 boot disk. At least I can then get access to the files to delete and/or replace possible offenders.

It's a tough one. I've been fooling with this stuff for 25 years, and am reasonably well versed with it, but I'm pretty stumped with this one. If I have to go the route of installing the floppy, booting to win98/dos...I will definitely do a complete fdisk/reformat/clean install.

Any other ideas are greatly welcomed.

 

Well, here is the important thing to keep in mind. Any driver error when booting to the hard drive, will not affect booting to the CD. Drivers on the hard disk are used when booting to the OS on the drive. The CD has its own drivers.

That said, you should not see any errors on a read only media, unless its damaged, or the hardware is failing, causing problems.

For instance, vga.sys being corrupt...

Its not corrupt on the CD. When being copied, it first goes to Ram, then to hard disk. So, it could be corrupting within the ram, and then being written incorrectly to the hard drive. Every file copied to the hard drive during an XP install is checked for integrity. As well, if its not even copying files to the hard drive yet, its just booting to CD, well then, its corrupted when its copied to ram. Pointing to a ram issue? Very possibly so.

See where I am going with this? An Atapi.sys error on boot of the OS could truly be a bad driver, sure. But it could also be that as it loads into ram, the driver basically blows up. I'd be suspicious of the ram, especially with the vga.sys error.

 

Pity about cleaning the CD.

I'm sorry to disillusion you but unless you are running XP on a FAT file system your Win98 will be of no use to you. XP normally uses a different file system (NTFS) which is inaccessible to Win98.

Since these are old systems I wonder if Adrynalyne may have a point about memory. Perhaps some has failed, perhaps there never was very much and the original XP was not an installation but a factory image placed on the disk which needs less memory, as XP needs more memory o install than actually run. This is because setup creates a virtual drive in RAM (memory) to load drivers etc. This is only possible if there is enough memory and is the process which goes on before the clean/repair install choice. Without enough memory the system falls over.

How much memory does the bios report at startup. Hold the pause key down to read it or press del to get into the bios.

Studio T

 

A further thought.
Check the bios settings for memory that is set aside from windows. this will be called ROM Shadow or cache, Video Bios Shadow or Cache, AGP aperture.
Note the settings, then disable them, setting the AGP aperture to minimum, probably 4M. You can always reseeet them up again later.

This will regain some memory for setup.

Your video driver cannot be corrupt if you can see proper stuff on the screen, although Windows, setup and bootup use different drivers at different times. Could the Photo instructions have asked your lad to change bios settings to 'enhance graphics'? Their install program can't have done it by itself.

Studio T

 

Yeah, I get that. But if nothing else, I can boot to dos with win98 disk, fdisk, and reformat. Then assuming no hardware problems I can do a clean xp install and choose to format again with either FAT or NTFS. I'm hoping it doesn't come to that, but it may be the best bet for software cleanup anyway.

 

Yes you can certainly try that, and finally let the new XP convert the drive to NTFS, although how you expect Fdisk to help with memory?

How much memory does the bios report?
Describe the exact failure in detail

Good luck with Fdisk.

Studio T

 

I just wanted to double bank and thank all of you for your help. I made the trip to try and help him last Saturday, with a bootable cd with memtest in hand (among a great many other things). It was immediately obvious that there were memory problems. I experimented with both dimms and both slots, and narrowed it down to one dimm. It's been replaced, and all is fine.

That's a first for me in 25 years. I've had pretty much every kind of problem imaginable, but never a memory failure, so I just didn't recognize the symptoms. Thanks to all of you for being smarter than me, and for all your very kind and astute assistance!!!!

 

Another satisfied geek. Thanks for the feedback on the final outcome, it goes to improve our answers.

Studio T logging off