I've been getting bsod's about once per day for a week or two now. I have tried replacing the ram and testing the ram with memtest but everything checks out. I tried to run powermax to check the hard drive but I cant get the computer to boot from the floppy or cd drive. I tried the floppy and cd in another pc and it works fine. I need to know what the next step is to diagnosing the pc.

Hi

to boot from a floppy or CD you need to set the BIOS to see it as the first bootable item, BIOS can be entered by pressing F2 or DEL or F10 etc as the pc is turned on.

It may also be that the floppy is either faulty or not connected correctly, as for the CD these usually boot fine, is it on the secondary IDE channel or slaved to the Hard drive.

I set the floppy as the boot device and it actually started to boot the powermax and then said a: cant start. I set the cdrom as the boot device and it started to load again and then displayed the same message cant start a:, I'm not new at this but i've never had a machine that wouldnt boot to the floppy or cd. I tried the floppy an cd in another machine and they both work. Both drives are also accessable in windows and work fine.

Both floppy and CD are IDE devices, and it might pay to reinstall the IDE device drivers for the motherboard - could be corrupted. Also replace the bios with latest flash version if you are competent to do that. Then do a full check for viruses, which can give the same symptoms see http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic58138.html

I'll give it a try tonight and message you back.

I keep getting : can't open
a:\>
a:/>
everytime I try to boot either with the floppy or cd so I took my hard drive out and tested it with another computer. I ran the extended test with powermax and it passed with no errors. Can anyone read one of my mini dumps and let me know where to look next? Attached are the 3 most recent. I've already cleaned out the dust from the machine and replaced and tested the ram.

depending on the age and model of your motherboard, it could be failing see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague Particularly check the section on Symptoms

Did you do a re-flash of the bios?

I will re-flash the bios today, do the mini dumps show anything?

I suspect the motherboard. I used to have 4 1gig ram chips installed but now I can only have 2; otherwise the machine wont post.

Hey leburch

I'm curious to know when these BSODs are occurring. Are they upon start-up or whilst windows is running? Also, please try and capture the error that the BSOD gives you - it will say something in capital letters right at the top (eg. PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGE_AREA etc.). This usually gives an indication as to what's causing it.

Spyder_1386

it used to always give me Bad_Pool_Header but I got PFN_List_Corrupt the other day

Is anyone able to read these mini dumps? there are 2 others a couple of posts back as well.

Every BSOD I get seems to point to NTOSKRNL.EXE any ideas on how to remedy this error?