Hi!

Troubles began after I installed an old game on my machine : Black and White. I installed the game, then the patch v1.3. After that (half an hour later) I had a BSOD. Since the CPU was overclocked, I thought it might be a sign of instability (the machine was stable 24 hours under prime though, but you never know...).

OK, I come back to more "classic" speeds, and after some minutes BSOD again. So I reboot, uninstall B&W. Boot, playing a few games, all seems fine. I leave the computer like that;when I come back later new BSOD. Annoyed, I read the error message this time : 0x00000024. MS support says "ntfs.sys corrupted, run chkdsk /F". So I do it, and boot again. Once again all seems fine until a new BSOD : 0x00000050 this time. I google on it, find out I could be victim of a root kit spyware, check the machine, but it seems clean. I tried a system restore to a previous day, but it doesn't help.

Now the funny part : I decide to run a windows repair from the Win XP Pro CD. the repair starts, and....BSOD! this time the code is 0x000000FC (ATTEMPTED_EXECUTE_OF_NOEXECUTE_MEMORY). I restart the machine, the setup starts again..and fail again, same point (34 minutes remaining) and same BSOD message. third attempt : same thing. I tried to start in safe mode, but it comes back to the setup.

I wanted to run a disk utility on my Samsung, but I must find one that boots from a CD (I throwed away my floppy a long time ago).

I ran memtest over night (10 hours), memory seems OK.

0xFC is related to mpegport.sys file according to MS, but:
- I've been running XP SP2 for months with A64 CPU.
- I can't get into windows anyway. I fear I'll have to install a new windows on my drive if I want to get it back to life.

Does anybody know why I get this error, and how to get rid of it?

Thanks for your help,
Abend Asra

I would just reinstall windows and run it on SP1 at first to see if it would BSOD running SP1, and if it doesn't let the automatic updates run and see if it BSODs on SP2. BSODs are the most common and the hardest to pin-point of all windows problems. I've seen people run memtests and find bad memory, they replace the memory and they still get them. Also check all the fans in your computer and if its dusty clean it out.

Did you return everything to the factory speeds or did you just back off the OC a bit?

Run everything at the rated speed, please. Test your RAM, test your hard drives.

@BiZ: I plan to install Windoz on a separate drive to see how it goes.

@Nodsu : Yes, I went back to stock speeds. I ran 10 hours memtests (full tests) without error. I found a samsung utility to test my drives, but it comes unfortunately on diskett format (My floppy drive is dead, and I haven't used floppies for a long time anyway).

I suspect a bad sector on the disk, but I 'd like to check the drive before returning it.

You can make a bootable CD out of a floppy image. Just download the Samsung thing and refer to the documentation of your CD burning program. Or download UBCD from www.ultimatebootcd.com

Thanks for the tip! (I used once bart CD, I hope it'll be easier to use than in the past).

I'm installing Win XP SP2 with a new drive (actually a seven years old 4Gb Quantum drive). It's not finished yet, but it went further than before (10 mn remaining). I'll update this thread after having run the utility for the Samsung.

Oh gosh that's painful. I think maybe because when you run Black and White, there is an update to your Direct X drivers. An outdated DirectX driver in WinXP SP2 will give a lot of problems?

why do you think you have the rootkit spy
isn't that a sony thing
check ms for there new patch for this not sure if others have a fix yet

@ Gary : I thought about driver or DirectX corruption: When I was still able to start my PC I ran dxdiag, which reported my directx version to be 9.0c. I ran several directx tests (graphics, sounds) whitout issue.

@samstoned: I just found a page in MS knowledge base describing causes for the 0x50 message. Root kit trojan was one of them (I think root kit is a generic name for some kind of evilware). Don't take my words though, I'm no virus expert.

About UBCD : Nice disc, but I couldn't find a way to test SATA drives. I just ran it quicly, so maybe I missed an option somewhere.

I installed win XP on my 4Gb drive, it seems OK. But this disk is IDE, not SATA. I'm running 3DMark2001 in loop now, while I'm at the office. So I guess the problem is located either in the HDD, either in the nForce4 chipset. I can see and communicate with my two sata drives, so it's probably a dead sector on the drive.

Under hard disk diagnostics there is the Samsung utility. Dunno, if it supports SATA - just try it.

Eventually I could test my sata drives (need last version of samsung's utility on their website), and both are in perfect condition.

The windows install I made on another drive ran 3dmark2001 in loop all day long, with the overclock you see in my sig, and all went fine.

So Windows was corrupted, maybe by B&W since it's not an XP game. I just have to install it in a new directory and reinstall all my applications.

Thanks all for your input!

Abend Asra