Windows problems (long)

Factual Questions
1

My system is a Dell PIII 1 GHz. with 256 ram.

OK so Friday night I decided to finally get rid of the spawn of Satan VPN software that my company so kindly provided me with. (Don’t ask, it’s ugly)

I did an fdisk and then reformatted my hard drive. I reinstalled ME. Installation crashed near the end, but then seemed to complete.

Later when I tried to install anything else, system crashed. I redid the Fdisk and format, and reinstalled ME. Got back on the net via the cable modem (yea!) but when I tried to pull down any update files from MicroSoft the system would crash. Every single time. And then it started crashing for no particular reason.

I got Norton Utilites to install and fixed all the problems I could find, including defraging the HD. Tried to install MS works. Crashed at least 10 more times.

Still no joy.

I redid the Fdisk and format and tried to install wind 98. Got it in, but could not get my ME drivers to work. Tried to upgrade from 98 to XP home edition, crashed, twice. Redid Fdisk and tried a clean install changing file format to NTFS. Crashed three more times.

REdid Fdisk (boy does all that old DOS stuff come back with a little practice) partitioned the drive (made a small C drive and a large D drive, just in case there was some wierd error that neither scandisk nor Diskdoctor could find) Installed ME to the D drive and this time the install completed.

Installed all the drivers for network, and sound card (had some problems with the SB installations, but at last all items on my device manager are connected and working.

Tried to upgrade to XP. Checked for hardware compatability. Told me that my sound card, might have a problem, and that the disk director (?) in control panel was not compliant with XP, contact the vendor! WTF, MS is the freaking vendor.

Tried to preform the upgrade. Crashed. Three times.

So I tried to do windows updates. I was able to download an updated video driver, but when I try to do an IE update the sytem crashes.

I must be overlooking something, but I will be dammned if I know what. Any suggestions?

2

Explain the nature of the crash (does it stick on the screen it’s on, does it show you a blue screen with white letters on, does nothing work but the mouse pointer moves etc…)

I am guessing that if your computer is crashing in so many different situations then it is a hardware problem. And, this is just a guess - Maybe your CPU is overheating.

Does the crash happen at rougly the same amount of time since you turned the computer on?

3

Crashes are mostly blue screen with white letters.
Vcache 01, fatal errors, exceptions. Other times missing DLL files, Kernel 32.dll, gdi32.dll, and many others.
Other times error mesaage boxes. Often spontaneous reboots. and the occasional dark grey screens requiring reset button.

I am doubting the overheating theroy becasue before Friday I had never had a problem. ME had been stable (well as stable as ME ever is) and I was just trying to renistall the factory OS.

4

I’ve had a similar problem. I got the to carry my computer into another room and my hands were just about to the point of burning. We opened up the case and the cpu didn’t have a fan. (it was Gateway, not me) and it was to the point where we couldn’t put our fingers on the heatsink. We put on a little fan and I haven’t had the case back on since. It’s been about 7 months.

5

Both fans are working.
It’s not the fans.

6

Can you boot from a DOS boot disk and run scandisk, with a thorough scan? Just a wild guess, but it sort of sounds to me like you’ve got a bad spot on the hard drive and the reinstall is attempting to write to the bad spot. The missing DLL errors could be coming from booting into the OS after the install crashed. It might not have copied the files, or might not have copied them correctly.

7

AFAIK, format should take care of the bad sectors. What OS were you using before all these happened?

8

Format will attempt to repair the bad sectors. It won’t mark them as bad like scandisk will, if they can’t be repaired. A disk with bad sectors is more likely to be usable after running scandisk. And if it’s not usable, scandisk at least does a better job of showing that the disk has bad sectors that format does.

9

Neither scan disk or Norton disk doctor found ANY errors. And God knows I have seen scan disk run enough this weekend.

I was running ME before. I did the fdisk and format to rid myself of some virtual private network software that I could not seem to get rid of. I was trying to reinstall the Dell factory stuff off the CDs supplied with my computer. This by all rights should work like a champ, as my system ran fine before.

When I started to have problems, I then decided to go to XP and shortcut the issue. That didn’t work either.
The last time I did the Fdisk, I partioned 10megs into C and the other 30 into D. I installed the OS into D. That way if there was an undetctable error in the first 10 megs of the drive, I would avoid it. I did get the OS in, but still can’t upgrade, or download updates.

10

It’s been awhile since I’ve had to use scandisk. If I recall correctly, you have to specify the thorough scan with a command line switch. Did you do that?

Did you try installing to C after partitioning? It could be that the bad spot is on D, or there could be bad sectors on both.

I’m sorry if it seems like I’m beating this to death. It just sounds like something I’ve experienced before. I got around that issue temporarily in a way similar to what you’re attempting. After I was able to get scandisk to show me where the bad sectors were, I was able (after several hit and miss attempts) to partition the drive into three partitions. The middle partitions held all the bad sectors. I reinstalled Windows 98 to the first partition as C, left the second parition unformatted, and formatted the third partition as D. Wasn’t pretty, but it at least allowed me to use the computer until I could scrape up the cash to buy a new hard drive.

There are other things that can cause problems like this, like CPU overheating or flaky memory or an IDE controller going bad, but if everything was working fine before and the only thing that has changed is the information on the hard drive, the hard drive is where I would look for the problem.

11

You could have a bad memory chip as cstamets has indicated. If you have a spare, try swapping it in, or if you’re running with 256Meg, try running with 128 to figure out which chip may be bad.

12

You mispelled damned and weird. Sometimes that causes problems. HTH

13

Oh, this happened to me before, but it was because I didn’t change the bios. So I just turned off boot & virus protection in the bios, so it could write a new boot sector & it went just fine. Bioses usually have some generic setting you should set to.

14

EasyPhil is da MAN!! One of my two 128 meg ram chips was the problem. Thank you so much for your help, and suggestion.
::: Rick bows in EasyPhil’s general direction:::