Black screen of death and odd BIOS text coloring

[phonb]

I was able to get a pic of the Bios coloring. All text is white when I am able to load XP normally, and text appears like this when I can't. The opening Bios screen where my HDDs and Ram are detected does not exhibit this error and has always been normal.

Notice 'safe mode with networking' is all in white text and I have no trouble running it.

 

[phonb]

Okay, I'm kinda restarting troubleshooting and hopefully will make my headache clearer so more can input. When booting XP SP3 normally I will get repeating crashes and restarts due to either - corrupted display driver or RAM or other unknown factors. My computer will not boot unless in Safe or VGA mode, and when in VGA mode (resolution 640x480 8bit) any attempt to up the display settings results in a crash. Whenever this problem occurs my bios looks like the IMG I linked in the previous post.
I have done absolute CLEAN installations of the most recent driver for my card. (Specs are in this thread). I can not ascertain the problem. Running in VGA mode I can view HD video with no problem. Though I can not increase the vid resolution beyond the current 640x480 without crashing. I think the tell tale sign is in the bios img I have provided in the previous post.

 

[Route44]

Question: Do you have access to another video card that you could temporarily install?

 

[phonb]

unfortunately i do not and have no other ideas how or what to troubleshoot.

 

[phonb]

My most recent minidump. The last two occurred while attempting to modify display settings in vga mode.

 

[Route44]

Three of the four dumps were the same 0x000000EA: THREAD_STUCK_IN_DEVICE_DRIVER
A device driver problem has caused the system to pause indefinitely (hang). Typically, this is caused by a display driver waiting for the video hardware to enter an idle state. This might indicate a hardware problem with the video adapter, or a faulty video driver.

All three cited the Nvidia display driver nv4_disp.dll as the issue. if the card is bad no amount of driver updates will fix this. The same goes if the PCI slot is bad.


The other error is 0x00000024: NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM
A problem occurred within NTFS.SYS, the driver file that allows the system to read and write to NTFS file system drives. There may be a physical problem with the disk, or an Interrupt Request Packet (IRP) may be corrupted. Other common causes include heavy hard drive fragmentation, heavy file I/O, problems with some types of drive-mirroring software, or some antivirus software.

It noted that the driver sptd.sys was not able to load. This a driver for DAEMON Tools Virtual Drive Manager. Often configured to be the very first driver to load when system starts; may cause instability. We have seen this driver and this software cause a lot of system issues over the years.

 

[phonb]

My os hard drive is very fragmented even after wiping most of the files and programs then defragging. Although it's been like that for sometime now. I've been wanting to clean install xp though I'm not sure if I can now that I'm having this problem with the display.

As for sptd I've already uninstalled Daemon tools yet the sys file remains. I'll try and find out if I can safely remove it.

 

[Route44]

Yes, that driver appears to still be present.

Sorry if I cause you to repeat yourself but have you run a harddrive diagnostics yet?

 

[phonb]

Sorry for the delayed response. I took a break from the headache for a day. I have run chkdsk a few times and disk defragmenter a few more. Nothing too alarming though. I run CCleaner sometimes and my most recent registry scan reveals many errors including those related to my nvidia drivers. CCleaner reports these as "ActiveX/COM" issues, and "Missing Shared DLL" issues. Could my registry be a cause for corruption of video drivers? I've only analyzed in CCleaner and plan not to run the clean til later.

 

[Route44]

When I speak of harddrive diagnostics it is much more than ChkDsk. Your harddrive's manufacture will provide a free hd diagnostic utility that you can burn to a CD and run tests from. Do both the short and especially the long test.

A corruptd registry can cause serious issues but we here at TechSpot strongly recommend AGAINST any registry "fixers" though we like CCleaner a lot. I certainly use it.

 

[phonb]

Testing my OS hard drive with Western Digital's Data Lifeguard Diagnostic successfully passed in both quick and extended scans. Also I ran the clean on my registry but to no avail.

Once again I checked all cables were properly connected when I noticed a connector for a USB port was loose on the mobo. I'm still convinced that it's a hardware issue and again stuck without any other ways to troubleshoot. I thought about reformatting and reinstalling windows but when booting from the XP CD the same text discoloration occurs, which makes me think it's not the software.

 

[phonb]

Also I checked my 2nd drive I use for storage and SMART diagnostics indicate a fail in the "spin up time" category.

 

[Route44]

Also I checked my 2nd drive I use for storage and SMART diagnostics indicate a fail in the "spin up time" category.

If it is failing in SMART then run your longest test. Sometimes this can repair bad sectors.

Back up everything from that storage drive ASAP.

 

[phonb]

Well I've been working in VGA mode for more than a couple weeks just fine. I've tried to limit use of this system as much as possible (file backing up and music production). Tonight I've had my system running longer than usual (per the past 2 weeks) and I get a NEW error:

The device, \Device\CdRom0, is not ready for access yet.

This happened 'every second' until I had to cut power to restart. At second intervals the computer would then hang. At the time I was not using the CD-Drive and also not undergoing any taxing video or CPU processes.

 

[Route44]

Is your CD ROM recognized in the BIOS? How old is this drive?