Any way around this other than a reformat?

Factual Questions
1

OK, so somehow my computer got seriously fcked up, and I mean fcked!

Here’s the deal: In the past three weeks my computer has crashed an average of twice per day, many times more. It started when I installed Shadows of Undrentide. I would be playing it or a while, and then the game would crash after five to thirty minutes. I noticed from reading their message board that a lot of poeple had that problem, so I stopped playing and was waiting for a patch to come out. Throughout the week, my PC would crash at random times, usually while using Media Player, but sometimes anytime.

I also bought and installed Star Wars Galaxies, and that crashed during game as well, a lot. Most of the crashes have been the windows XP blue screen, but sometimes I merely got kicked from the game.

I also stopped playing galaxies for a while. I haven’t played that in about five days. But now, I crash left and right while doing simple things like browsing the internet. I also think I had some spyware, since a couple pop-ups alkways appeared when I started IE, so I ran Ad-Aware, but guess what? Yup, a crash. And when I started up, it crashed again after logon. I tried to run it again, but more crashing insued. I ran Spybot, it got a lot of stuff, but no crash. It couldn’t remove one item, so i restarted and ran it again, this time it did crash.

So trhat’s where I am, I get a blue screen now every five to thirty minutes, it seems, for no reason. It seems that whatever serious ass thing that occured can only be gotten rid of with a reformat, which means all 100 GB of my stuff I have is gone unless I back it up on CD-R’s, which will take a loooong time.

So, any other suggestions before I do the almost inevitable?

2

It might help if we knew exactly what Blue Screen error XP is reporting. Write down what error is beign reported and any other salient information from the Blue Screen. However, if the crashes are that frequent, a reformat and reisntall might be the only viable solution.

3

Invest in a second HD or tape backup?

4

I don’t see a way to save your data without shelling out some cash.

If I were you, I’d buy a new hard drive, install that as master, and install your OS on there. Then you can pull stuff off your old hard drive (set as slave) at your leisure. I’m not willing/able to walk you through this process though.

Hal

5

New Hard Drive will be your best bet as has been suggested.

6

Well, I can surely put in a new hard drive myself, I just don’t want to shell out the cash to do it, and if I did, I wouldn’t want to get a large one, since I have a 120 GB one as it is now. I can’t give you the error, because it’s different. It usually says:

DRVR_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or something very similar to that, though occaisonally it is different. It then gives the memory address (i think that’s what that it) at the bottom of the screen. That is almost always different, though I will write it down next time I see it and see if it is the same more than once.

I have about 90 CD-R’s right now, that’s about 60 gigs, so if I get another fifty, then that should cover everything I need to save, since things like games and other programs I can reinstall, it’s just the loads of media I can’t replace.

7

DRVR_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL is usually caused by corrupt hardware drivers or the hardware itself. Have you installed any new hardware recently? It might be worth trying to get updated drivers for as much of your hardware as possible.

Also, have you considered using XP’s Restore feature? You could try going back to a time before you installed the game that started all the problems and see if that cures your ills.

8

You can re-install XP withoutr losing all your data. You’ll lose a little but documents, MP3’s and whatnot can be retained.

Use the Windows Recovery Console to boot to a command prompt, then rename the Windows and Program Files directories to something else.

Then reboot and re-install XP. It will see the existing installation but will give you the option to create a complete new installation. Once you’re back up and running, you can delete the old directories once you’re sure there’s nothing useful in them.

9

OK, so i used the system restore to go back to the day before I installed Shadows of Undrentide. After I restarted, I ran Ad-Aware, as that was the surefire crash-detector, and it crashed halfway through scanning my registry (it had already found 15 things.) I get the blue screen saying “IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” , but no DRVR this time (maybe it was never there?0 The numbers at the bottom were 0x000000A (0X31A532FC, 0X0000000, 0X00000001, 0X80526663)

Another thing I forgot to metion, every time I have to restart from a crash, I have to unplug my monitor from my video card and plug it back in while the PC is off. If I don’t, then the monitor says there is no signal. This seems odd, as I am not affecting the video card in any way. Why would my monitor do this? I mean, the video card should be sending a signal regardless of the monitor being replugged back in. (And it’s not just that I need to restart a few times to get the video card to work, if I do not unplug the monitor while te PC is off and plug it back in and turn it on, it will tell me there is no signal.)

10

i know none of your recent install actions would point to this, but for me this could always be an overheating problem. cpu gets too hot and boom, BSD ( BlueScreenofDeath). Check cpu fan and heatsink is a possibility.

you’re not overclocked, are you?

summer temps can do this if it’s really hot where you are, as well.

b.

11

Bouv, I was getting that same error. It turned out that my RAM was set one setting too fast in my BIOS. You may want to check that out. Also, make sure you have the latest video drivers, DirectX, etc. And check your sound drivers, after I killed THAT BSoD, my sound card started acting up.

12

Oh, and you may want to try getting the latest BIOS, it helped my crashes a ton.

13

Microsoft has detailed documentation on debugging this type of error. It’s a bit too detailed for my tastes.

So, some easier things to try. Try booting into safe mode. Try to see if the system is more stable in safe mode. Also, open Windows Explorer, right click on your C: drive, select properties. Then on the tools tab click the “Check Now” button. Does it complete without finding any errors?

About reinstalling drivers… what kind of computer is this. Did it come with a CD with all the drivers on it? (Dell ships their systems with a CD called the Dell Resource CD, for example.)

14

An option that might get you out of a jam caused by some unfathomable mess in the HKEY_CURENT_USER area of the Registry is to log in as Administrator and create a new profile for yourself, effectively giving a clean start.

If the problem is in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, well…