Can anyone read minidumps? (BSOD)

Megalith · February 16th, 2004, 05:02 PM

I am greeted to a BSOD everytime I try to boot up my PC normally, which happens right after the Welcome screen in Windows XP. I can only boot up through safe mode now and I don't know what is causing it, and what is worse is that I can't seem to uninstall anything in this mode in an attempt to kill the culprit.

Is there anyone here who I can send my minidump to in an effort to analyze and discover what is causing this issue? I am sure there is a conflicting driver, but I just have no clue which one.

Urban_Squrill · February 16th, 2004, 05:04 PM

You may just have to reinstall.

Martee · February 17th, 2004, 01:00 AM

What does the bluescreen say?

Email me the minidump and I'll take a look at it tomorrow. No guarantee that I'll be able to determine the problem, but I'll do what I can. My email address is mdill at uvic dot ca.

Megalith · February 17th, 2004, 02:30 AM

The blue screen has the following:

STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x00000003, 0x86BDFBD0, 0x86BDFD44, 0x805FA19A)

I will send you the minidump file now.

Xtreeme · February 17th, 2004, 03:44 PM

VM error possibly. You run scandisk on that hdd ever? How about as of late? If your Virtual mem is dumped or bad as the sector on hdd is fudged or whatever. It will give a error when going to read data it expected to be there but obviously its not. Its just one of many possiblites though. It could also be a program in your startup aswell. Or heck mem or other hardware. Id start with trying scandisk though. In safe mode Right mouse click your c drive (under my computer icon). Or drive XP is installed to C being default. Now go to properties in options tab that pops up. Now choose tools. THen go to check disk (error checking). It will now restart in special mode so next boot it will scan before OS even loads. Can do it now cause it needs to access certain files in windows that its going to scan. Needs full access not shared. And that would be like Virtual mem and running programs plus the NT kernel itself. So just reboot after choosing to scan. It'll tell ya. Then reboot and wait---------depending on speed of pc could be a bit. For me with 80gig hdd usually about 15min. But its REALLY full too.

Megalith · February 17th, 2004, 05:45 PM

I tried running scandisk on my C drive in safe mode using the steps that you had listed. It scans the drive, but it does it right away in Windows, and does not wait to restart and scan at boot-up. How do I get scandisk to scan the system before the OS loads?

Bovon · February 17th, 2004, 07:32 PM

I like to run scandisk from DOS when I feel there is a problem. You can make a basic bootdisk from a win98 machine and put scandisk on it. If you do not have access to a win98 machine, go and download a bootdisk file from www.bootdisk.com, execute the file which will create a bootdisk direct to a floppy disk in your A: drive. Put a copy of scandisk on the floppy and reboot. At the A: prompt, type scandisk C: (or whichever drive letter you want).

You can also simply put a copy of scandisk on any floppy where you can get to a DOS prompt..but since I have not tried this with any OS other than win9x.. I don't know if it will work with 2K or XP..but the bootdisk with scandisk on it will work very well.

Megalith · February 17th, 2004, 10:53 PM

Nevermind, I got scandisk to work. It seems to only run on boot-up if you check the two options that are available. Unforunately, no errors were found.

Megalith · February 18th, 2004, 01:25 PM

Now scandisk tries to start up everytime I attempt to boot normally. How can I stop this?