My friend's mom's computer has been blue screening lately and they have no idea what's wrong. I want to help him find out what the problem is and luckly they gave me a picture of the crash screen. In her own words: "It starts up, goes really slow, and blue screens."
Here is the picture with the code:
[IMG]http://i60.tinypic.com/2qlfkno.jpg[/IMG]
The computer is 5 or 6 years old and wasn't custom built. It is an HP of some sort but is running uncharacteristically slow. My friend says it has 2 sticks of RAM in it but he's not sure how large each stick is. The computer claims to have 3 gigs of RAM total. If need be we can gather more info from it or it's hardware but we wanted to see if it could be solved with the info we already have so far.
Thanks in advance, ~Tas
UPDATE #1: So we got the external hard drive and were going to transfer the pictures and stuff so that we could wipe the drive and reinstall windows, but this time it wouldn't even boot up. It gave us the option of windows startup recovery or boot normally, booting normally would automatically restart the computer and send us back to square 1, the startup recovery ended in this blue screen: [IMG]http://i57.tinypic.com/sgsak2.jpg[/IMG]
We tried this multiple times with the same results so we decided to put the drive into my computer to access the raw files and not boot off of it so we could get the pictures. I hooked it up and turned on the computer and bam, bluescreen. I think it may have been a slightly different one but I didn't get a pic because the computer restarted automatically. I went into the bios and force booted off of my ssd and I got the same two choices of windows startup recovery or boot normally, I was scared so I turned off the computer and unplugged the drive. When I turned it on again I got those two infamous choices again and booted normally- everything worked fine. I tried to hot-swap connect the drive but it didn't show up so I used asus boot setting to restart straight into the bios and force booted off my ssd again and got another blue screen. I wasn't going to risk anymore so I unplugged the drive, force turned off my computer, booted back up and got those two options again, chose start normally and here I am. There doesn't seem to be any lasting problems with my computer but something is seriously fucked up on that HDD. My plan was to wipe the drive after getting the pics off of it and load linux on to it to determine if it was hardware or not. Now I can't even do that... any thoughts on what might be wrong??
I'd suggest doing a clean install with recovery disks or an OEM copy. Boot from a usb with a linux distro and see if still bluescreens. if it does than its prabably a hardware issue. but if the issue is when it boots to the OS, then there is something on that OS that is causing the problem. In which case there are not much options besides a clean install, getting a virus removal from bestbuy or staples which will land you -150$, or just getting a new one all together.
Tomorrow I'm going to try to fix the drivers. If that doesn't do it then I'll boot into linux and test. If it's hardware I'll update the topic. My guess is that it is software but we are doing a clean install no matter what, they're just waiting for an external hard drive to ship so his mom doesn't loose her 100+ gigs of pictures.
I just finished redoing the thermal paste to help with the heat.
Are you able to run the hdd through a usb interface > like an external drive?
Also mash F8 before you get the bsod and see if you get to the advanced startup menu.
If you're worried about it being a heavily infected drive run in a system using a live disc (inux distro of choice) with all your other drives disconnected. Again try it as a usb device, and backup from there.
If the above fails then chances are the hdd is toast. You then have the option of (if data is important) professional recovery (big $$$) or a chance at deep freezing it and trying again (sometimes this ghetto method works ~ has for me for like 5 mins).
My friend has a usb enclosure and he said he was going to try it but I'm not sure if he has yet because he has to prepare for finals. I will let you know if that worked or not though, when I find out.
We just tried through a usb interface and the computer recognized the drive as a mass usb storage device under devices and printers but under computer it doesn't show up. How do we access the files??
I just suggested this in another thread a few minuets ago
https://www.runtime.org/ccform.htm
I have had very good outcomes with Get Data Back NTFS. Its not a free app but... Like I said in the last thread its simple to use and and you can make your money back in one shot if you charge someone for a data recovery job. and is a great tool to have around. You can download the demo to make sure you will be able to recover the data.
also if you everyone who works on PCs for people should get one of these