This laptop gives a blue screen while starting
The error seems to revolve around srtspl64.sys
Fortunately, the PC starts fine in safe mode.
A quick search shows that the error is most likely due to norton / symantec security problems.
So I disable all symantec and norton services and automatic startup routines, and then manage to start windows normally.
After that, its easy: uninstall norton, and install Microsoft security essentials
Another interesting problem with one of my own systems…
I was cloning a hard drive (as part of a customer upgrade), and after 1 hour of waiting, I started to suspect that something was wrong…
After all, cloning about 35gb of data from a 80gb drive to a 320gb drive shouldn’t take that long.
I decide to start windows normally, just to look at the contents of the 80gb drive.
Well, windows get part way through the startup, and then I see the familiar blue screen of death.
I didn’t look at the actual numbers, but I know a blue screen is caused by either a change in software/drivers (not in this case), or a hardware failure.
Since the most recent change was adding the 2 hard drives, I figured unplugging them should do the trick… nope.
Ok, try memtest86: no memory fault.
Change video cards: no change.
I pull out all the pci cards, and any disks I can. but now it gets difficult to make the problem happen. The blue screen only happens while I’m trying to start from my hard drive.
I can get to the bios.
I can boot bartpe from the cd, and i can run a few system tests… all with no problem.
The system even starts in safe mode correctly…
I then decide to start pulling out the RAM sticks. (I have 3 sticks of 512Mb).
After pulling the first one out,the system started normally!
After some swapping, I found the RAM was not faulty, but a particular socket was to blame… I wonder why memtest86 didn’t detect a problem…
Another strange yet frustrating problem.
Customer has a laptop that no longer starts.
Before I saw it, I thought it would be another corrupt registry problem.
when I got to the laptop, I could see it was partly starting xp, and then would blue screen of death, with the error: “unmountable_boot_volume”.
So I decide to boot from bartPE, but I found I couldn’t do a fixboot command. Customer didn’t have the original XP installation CD, so I had to take it back to the office.
I then removed the HDD, connected it to the office PC, and backed up all the important data.
While that was happening, I did some research, and I found that a chkdsk /f , followed by a fixboot should fix the problem.
So I do the chkdsk /f e: (it took a while), but the fixboot e: command returned: fixboot is not recognized as an internal or external command … etc
OK, it looks like I’ll need to boot to the recovery console to complete this.
So I plug the HDD back into the laptop, start it (expecting to see the BSOD), and the PC boots normally 🙂
OK looks like I don’t need to do the fixboot after all. Cool!