BSOD on normal start of XP Pro/No start in SAFE mode

[Rockspot]

I'm trying to fix a Dell E510 with XP Pro for a friend of mine who is anything but PC-literate. He had a number of vermin in residence that I cleaned off for him and sent him home with the PC. When he got home, he said he had a yellow shield in the lower corner. I had him click on it and tell windows to install the updates. They installed and it told him he needed to restart to complete the install ... so he hit the start button to shut it down and restart it. It never restarted. Instead he got a BSOD:

0x0000007E (0xC000001D, 0x80537008, 0xF78CC3B8,0xF78CC0B4)

and ... it won't boot up into any of the safe mode choices.

I had him bring it back and I've been trying a number of things to get it to understand it's a PC and not an oversized paperweight, all to no avail. I have an Ultimate Boot CD and can get it to boot from that CD so I thought I'd go to the recovery console and do a chkdsk /r or maybe a fixmbr ... but it wants me to enter an Administrator password. Huh???? Chatted with Dell and they said they don't assign an Administrator password and told me to just hit enter. Nope ... "invalid entry, enter the Administrator password." I tried: Administrator, Admin, ADMIN, admin, administrator, default .... all, no go.

Anybody got any ideas short of having this guy bring me his restore disks and taking it back to day one? Oh yeah, and before I give it back to him I'm gonna sit him down and explain the proper procedure for shutting down and restarting his PC.

 

[Archean]

If you don't know administrator account password it will be very difficult to go anywhere with this frankly.

This update (KB977165) has been the reason for many people having BSOD. And as far as i know Microsoft has stopped distribution of this update.

To fix it check this thread out from Microsoft as well.

 

[Rockspot]

Thanks for the Reply

Gave up and did a restore after getting the original CDs from the owner.