Huge Blue Screen of Death Issue

[Intranetusa]

Started up EB 1.1 with BI
with Sinuhet formations, Phalanx mod, and historical battles minimod


Crashed to a blue screen of death saying 'fatal system error blah blah', rebooted - windows crashed again before it could even reboot, rebooted 2x more times before I went to the screen to select system restore.

Anyone have this issue/any fixes?


Edit: oh yeh, I rebooted 3x more times (it crashes on every other reboot if I don't do the restore), reinstalled everything, and tried again - it crashed again and now even my profile and desktop has a glitchy purple color. I had to do a restore to fix it. O_o

This is getting weird

[Intranetusa]

Further info: I was using the "EB Single Player shortcut" file in the EB folder, and edited it with the -mod:EB command because it initially didn't have it.

[LorDBulA]

Crashed to a blue screen of death saying 'fatal system error blah blah'

If its an old windows install I recommend system reinstall.

[Tellos Athenaios]

Also: review the size of folder such as "My Documents", "My Pictures", "My Music" etc. etc. Sum the size of the contents of these folders and post the total.

[Intranetusa]

If its an old windows install I recommend system reinstall.

??

It's windows vista, with EB 1.1

woah, now I'm getting the Black Screen of Death even before startup >_<

[LorDBulA]

It's windows vista, with EB 1.1

I don't mean windows version but age of current windows installation.
Unless you are using small number of programs and are not checking out new things windows good performance life is quite short.
In my experiance 3 month is a mark after witch you can easily see big hit on windows performance (Although I dont have as much experience with Vista and in general it greatly depends on how gentle did you treat your fragile windows install ).

If you are experiencing lots of trouble full reinstall is the best thing to do.
It will also help you to reveal if problems you are experiencing are of software or hardware nature.

[Intranetusa]

Apparently it has become a hardware problem now...95% of the time the screen is black on bootup (so I can't even do a restore).
5% of the time it doesn't become black, it freezes and the screen turns purple-green.

[Tellos Athenaios]

That says, frankly nothing at all. I've seen one XP install get broken beyond repair by someone who had installed a copy of the SIMS 2 to "My Documents". That just killed it; as My Documents, My Pictures, My Videos, My Music, and My Downloads etc. etc. all get indexed at boot up.

Add I have seen Vista break over a Windows update... You haven't by any chance done a Windows update lately?

[Intranetusa]

Nope. Frankly, I have no idea what's going on or what is causing the problem because I can't even get past bootup =(

[Tellos Athenaios]

Well; try re-installing Windows completely.

[Intranetusa]

I can't even do that - the screen is entirely blank even if I try to reinstall windows from a disk or do a system wipe.

I think I'm going to have to take my laptop in for repairs =(

[Tellos Athenaios]

Hmm, so you can't even get to POST ? (POST is when the logo of your computer/motherboard manufacturer is displayed.)

In that case you may require a whole new motherboard; meaning if you bought your PC ready-made you should check if you are not better off buying a new one.

[Intranetusa]

Hmm, so you can't even get to POST ? (POST is when the logo of your computer/motherboard manufacturer is displayed.)

yeh, 90% of the time I can't even get to see POST. 5% of the time I do get to it, I press a single button and the screen fuzzes up and crashes.

5% of the time I get past post to the login, and the screen turns purple-green and crashes.

In that case you may require a whole new motherboard; meaning if you bought your PC ready-made you should check if you are not better off buying a new one.

Holy crap...

[Tellos Athenaios]

Yeah I know that's pretty rough. But the point of failure occurs at the 'motherboard runs everything stage'. POST is an pre BIOS test system it checks for errors occuring when loading the BIOS.

For the BIOS to load you do not require a hardisk or graphics card; however your CPU, motherboard and (the crucial part of) the RAM must function properly. If it's the RAM you are lucky.

Otherwise you are in for as good as a computer replacement (what with hourly wages and stuff to get things repaired/replaced.) Especially considering you have a laptop.

Since you mention a pink/purple/green screen and other general signs of overheated GFX cards.. I hope the GFX card is actually a seperate GFX card and not a chip attached onto the motherboard? The latter case may explain everything though: if that component had overheated it would've destroyed part of the motherboard fairly easily.

You can try if it really is your lucky day by getting a free, low-requirements & basic OS which also runs from a live-cd; burn that (the live-cd image) on a CD/DVD; mount it in the CD/DVD-drive and try if you can get till POST on the broken machine. When there try to get your machine to boot off the CD/DVD drive by hitting the key which makes your BIOS switch to the screen that lets you select your booting device. Select the cd/dvd rom there.

Now if it is your lucky day the lightweight OS should boot off the CD/DVD and you can at least install it. That means you can at least recover a working machine under a different OS; which you may use to figure out what parts of your PC are actually broken...

[Intranetusa]

computer replacement...signs of overheated GFX cards...destroyed part of the motherboard...

This is indeed an ill omen from the gods...

[bovi]

Try to run memtest (google it), one of the times you actually get your computer to start. That can find out if it's the memory causing problems. When I added more RAM, I had to reduce the RAM speed in the BIOS to make it stable, but that was all it took.

Also, if you have more than one chip of RAM, take them out and try to run with each one in turn to find out which chip is screwy. Make sure you've discharged static electricity in your body first before touching the chips. You can do this by touching the water tap, as that should be grounded.

[Intranetusa]

Thanks, I'll try all of those suggestions.

[bovi]

Let's hope you took it as self-explanatory that you need to power off your computer and unplug it before doing anything with its insides .

[Chris_]

Also, next time you get the bluescreen, make a note of the error code. The only bluescreens I've seen on Vista have been STOP errors. It should say something like STOP : 0x0000000A somewhere near the bottom. Also, there should be a description of the error below the "windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer" line. You can search for the error code/description, which might help you narrow it down.