Blue Screen Help Please.

redfan

sisters pc with valuable photos on it
os is window xp media centre
2 seconds in to windows get the blue screen
wont let me in to f8 safe mode what so ever
is there any software via floppy or other i can use to get the last known good config?
i dont want to wipe it .
any help would be awesome

youcancallmeal

Is there any recently installed software or hardware that might have caused this? What kind of PC is it? Do you know much about PC's? If you have have two sticks of RAM it could be worth trying them one at a time to rule out memory errors. If not then google memtest and run it to test for memory errors. If you have a second PC or even a friends you could always take the hard drive from yours and hook it up to that to get the data off it.

redfan

its a dell pc tower 3 year old.
did the memory change idea no joy.
she dosnt want me striping the pc to get the hdd out of it .. women ehhh lol

i heard of a floppy that will sort them blue screen errors out before . or was i just dreaming?

witnessmenow

can i suggest getting a linux live cd (maybe ubuntu or something similar.)

Burn it to a cd following the instructions on there site, stick it in at bootup, let it load up , click launch, let it load up , and you should now have access to your hard drive. find the photos you want and drag them to a memory stick.

There is no risk at all in trying it this way , and you dont have to mess with the inside of the pc. Doesn't fix whats wrong with the pc, but at least photos wont be lost!

unnameduser

Does the blue screen show an error message?

tak

Won't it be necessary to install Ubuntu before you can see what files are on the disk ? At least I got a message sayiing it was unable to mount that volume when I tried to drill down into the disk contents from an Ubuntu DVD boot . . .

But even if an installation is needed it is still a cool way of recovering otherwise lost files.:cool:

witnessmenow

I don't think so, i took stuff off a disk using the live cd, remeber that your external hard drive cant be formated as ntfs (its a windows file system and linux cant write to it, although i think the brand new ubuntu can) . Its also possible that your hard drive is corrupt, i had to run a tool from this ultimate boot cd before i could mount the drive, it checked the disk for errors then corrected them(cant remeber what its called, sorry!). My windows instalation was corrupt and it wasn't able to repair that but i was still able to recover most of the files from the hard drive before i re-installed windows. I'm currently doing something really similar to this right now so i'll keep you posted on what i'm doing and if its working!!

witnessmenow

My friends laptop was showing up the blue screen of death as you tried to start up windows. I used a program called hard disk regenrator(i think) scanned and repaired the hard disk(found one bad sector) , took ages, i mean all night ages! but the next time i turned it on it went into windows, it ran the checkdsk program before i got into windows so i just let that run through. He lost nothing at all as far as i can tell, windows is exactly as was before.

The tax man

Sorry Redfan don't mean to hijack your thread but seeing that I've a fairly similar problem I didn't think it needed a new thread of it's own.
I've a Compaq Presario laptop that's just going around in circles trying to boot up. Last known good working option doesn't work, safe mode doesn't work basically any option I choose doesn't work. I get a flash of the blue screen and it starts to reboot.
I've pressed f8 and disabled automatic reboot on failure and it's saying...
BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO.
Is there anything out there that could help get a good config back onto my laptop. I can't really go down the format route cause I've alot of stuff on the HD I just can't delete. I let the laptop do a HD test via it's own setup area and it passed though I've no idea how good a test it does.
Last thing it was doing was getting an update from Micro$oft and then it wanted the pc restarted.Before I rebooted I was restoring to an earlier point due to some usb modem files doing funny things. Restore point app ran fine then I restarted pc for updates to take affect and when it did it started this loop.
Any discs I have for the laptop do nothing,drivers/applications cds and Windows cd just wants to reinstall windows but wants me to format the drive first.
As redfan, any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Capt'n Midnight

If all else fails there is this - put the drive in another computer etc.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its 'Photo Recovery' name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License.

extra-ordinary_

Get ERD Commander and see if it can explore the drive. When your sis realises all her pics are gone, maybe then she'll let you stick it in another machine.

The tax man

Well I got my baby up and running again. After downloading this and that and running test after test and all results were coming back fine I was really starting to get píssed off. After a few more google searches I came across this step by step guide to rebuild a good bootable config.
This may be computing 101 to some of you guys but I certainly found it extremely helpful and it worked a treat.
I was going mad surfing the net on an old desktop pc running win98 with every page coming up with script errors etc.
Don't know what other types of BSOD it might solve but it sorted my BAD_SYSTEM_CONFIG_INFO problem.
I'm happy to be back online with up to date hardware\software.:D:D

ollielaroo

Hi redfan,

it’s important to get the exact text of the error on this screen. This can matter in determining what is causing the problem even if the message doesn’t make sense to you.

You will probably get more specific help here when you provide text from the error message...

unnameduser

echos above ...

unnameduser

any luck with this OP?

redfan

got it sorted guys . cheers