Computer restarts randomly frequently

[abk]

Hey,
I was just repairing my friend's computer.
After installing Windows XP SP3 afresh I came across this issue.
The PC randomly restarts and gets hung. Dont know why.
Went through a couple of forums on this website and other, but couldn't find a solution...
Also the blue screen which appears tells me a tcpip.sys error
I've got an event ID: 1003 Cat: 102 System error.

The PC restarts too frequently...too confusing to find out the cause.
There are virtually no softwares installed on it since its freshly installed OS.
I've uploaded the minidumps which I got (hopefully its got attached).

Help required. Thanks

 

[odriscoll27]

ok cant view these dumps on this computer at the mo so will download them

however the BSOD yhur getting is one that typically occurs after a fresh install of Windows OS when a device driver is incompatible. What OS was on there before? im just wondering if a fresh install of Windows XP with SP2 might be better. I will have a look at the dumps and let yhu know

James

 

[abk]

I thought the OS might be an issue. But i'd installed that also on another PC and it worked perfectly fine. So..
Also that PC is quite old...maybe the OS could be an issue. But that's the last resort I want to take wrt software...
Thanks for the efforts man

 

[odriscoll27]

no probs though somthing did occur to me
a few times ive installed a Windows OS and it either crashed during installation or after a fresh install and ive found it to be a bad memory module. have yhu considered running memtest on the old PC??

 

[abk]

well...I hope running the memtest will help. I'll try it. But I'm afraid that the PC will restart before it completes...because it has been doing that with all the programs I run on it. It restarts sometimes with a bluescreen or sometimes even randomly without any error being shown in the event viewer.
Will post the results of memtest...

Any update on the Minidumps which I attached earlier?

 

[odriscoll27]

Corrupt / Missing HAL.dll

Sorry for taking so long to reply but ive broken two fingers so typing is bit hard at the mo .
Did you have any luck on the memtest???

having looked at the dmp files it looks like the file "Hal.dll" might be missing or corrupt. this is the Hardware Abstraction Layer" which allows the windows operating system to interact with your hardware.

There are a few steps this may be solved:

Step 1: Check the boot device order in BIOS. For this follow the steps below:

Restart your computer and keep pressing the Delete button on keyboard. This will take you to BIOS screen.
Go to Boot Menu in BIOS and verify that your hard disk which contains Windows installation is the topmost in boot sequence if you have more than one hard disk.

Step 2: If the above step does not solve your problem, then you need to repair the boot.ini file.
Follow the procedure below to repair original boot.ini file

• Firstly arrange a Bootable Windows XP setup CD.

• Boot from bootable Windows XP setup CD and press R to enter recovery console which allows to restore the corrupted boot.ini file to original.

• Now enter your administrative username and password, when you get the command prompt type the following command “bootcfg /rebuild” (without double quotes) and press Enter.

• Bootcfg utility on the Windows XP setup CD will scan your drives for any Windows XP installations and then display the results which you can select to repair the corresponding boot.ini file.

• The first prompt asks to Add installation to boot list? (Yes/No/All). type “Y” (without double quotes) and press enter.

• The next prompt asks to Enter Load Identifier ” This is nothing but the name of the operation system which appears at the time of Booting ” :type Windows XP Professional or Windows XP Home Edition or simply Windows XP and press Enter.

• Now it will ask to Enter OS Load options: type /Fastdetect and press Enter.

• Take the Windows XP bootable CD out from the tray and Type exit and then press Enter to restart your PC.

• Hopefully the above solution provided will help to fix the trouble!

Step 3: In most of the cases, Step 1 on checking the boot order and Step 2 on repair of boot.ini file will fix the problem. In case the problem is still there, you need to replace the hal.dll from Windows XP Boot disk. For this, boot the computer with the help of Windows XP Boot CD, select the repair setup. On command prompt, type the command as below:

expand x:\i386\hal.dl_ y:\windows\system32\hal.dll​

Where x is the drive letter of your CD-ROM and Y is drive letter of your windows partition (usually c: )


Step 4: Worst Case is that the hard drive is faulty :O


hope this helps for now
James