Blue screen of death? Bad pool caller

RiseToMe

About three weeks ago i turned on my laptop, sony vaio on vista (VGN_NR32m) to be met with a blue screen and told to restart. I did and havent seen the screen since.

However, this morning i turned it on to do some college work and was met with the screen again:

BAD_POOL_CALLER
0x000000c2 (0x00000007, 0x0000110B, 0x085e0014, 0x87BBC78)

collecting data for crash dump..
initializing disk for crash dump..

I know SFA about computers and I am at the end of my college degree with essays and case records due left right and centre, i am not beyond taking it somewhere to be repaired if repairing it myself is not possible but I really would appreciate any help. At all. In any form.

If this laptop goes kaput I am up the creek entirely.

the_syco

Hrm. Seems to be driver related. You should be able to go into Safe Mode, though. Start up laptop, keep pressing F8, and select Safe mode. Plug in a USB key, and backup your essays, etc.

Then look at this thread that has more info on fixing it.

RiseToMe

Gonna get an external hard drive this afternoon, have put everything I need off it into one huge folder and will transfer it over and then do that.

Is the laptop likely to just give up?

FSL

As an aside whenever you are working on anything you should always have the work in progress saved on two preferably three different devices, not all in the same location.

bonzodog2

After you have your documents saved elsewhere, boot in Safe Mode and try going back to a restore point

the_syco

RiseToMe wrote: »

Is the laptop likely to just give up?

Not really. Driver problems are usually not that bad. All else fails, reinstalling Windows would fix it, but once you have your stuff backed up, going into Safe Mode and troubleshooting the problem shouldn't be that bad.

From Google, it seems said drivers have gone missing, and thus it may just need to be reinstalled. Best to keep the laptop off until you backup your files, on the (small) off chance that something is corrupting your files.

RiseToMe

Cheers guys, I do have my college work saved in the cloud, the problem that the laptop my only means of working on anything as my course is a UK degree and I am not based I'm the UK so no college computers etx

RiseToMe

Actually guys does anybody have any idea how much would cost to get the laptop wiped and reloaded to factory specs?

bonzodog2

It may already have a recovery partition

edit: try pressing F10 while booting

jgarry28

You should be able to do this yourself easily enough. At the start when you boot the machine click F10 immediately (at least I think it is F10 for a VAIO, you should see it on the opening screen anyhow). That should get you to the reset menu.

RiseToMe

Thanks jgarry,

Problem I dont have any boot disks for this laptop.

the_syco

Just before you do the factory reset;

FACTORY RESET WILL DELETE ALL OF YOUR FILES!

See if you can run it in Safe Mode first (press F8 when it's starting up) to copy the files to a portable harddrive, first. Then reboot the laptop, and press F10, and you'll be given the option to reinstall Vista.

RiseToMe

Thanks syco, Yeah I know will everything, not doing it until my documents are all backed up