Something broken?

My XP started giving giving BSOD on boot. Sometimes it starts normally but then gives BSOD again and reboots. The error messages on the bluescreen change. My backup OS Kubuntu says "Kernel panic" on boot and if it boots it will freeze at some point. Kubuntu live CD does the same. AIDA32 doesn't show any problems in my system, fans are working, temperature is normal.

Anyway, I think it's a hardware problem, but what's broken? RAM? Could it cause that?

Sounds like a bad motherboard to me, but you might want to try opening it up and blowing out the dust. That occasionally causes problems, but it probably wont fix anything.

If it was bad RAM it wouldn't finish booting, you'd get an error message before Windows started to load.

Is this a desktop or laptop?

It's desktop. There was less dust than I expected and I already blowed it out yesterday. I hope it's not the motherboard but there aren't many choices left :P I tried a different graphics card too since someone suggested it could be the cause but it wasn't.

Have you tried going straight into the BIOS to see if it dies in there too?

maybe it's not the motherboard but the hd/s. Try disconnecting your hd/s, and turning your machine on. If it shows problems, then it's the motherboard. If not, then the hd/s is/are probably the problem/s

it happened to me once, so it's never bad to give it a try.

chess_rock wrote: maybe it's not the motherboard but the hd/s. Try disconnecting your hd/s, and turning your machine on. If it shows problems, then it's the motherboard. If not, then the hd/s is/are probably the problem/s

He said he tried booting from a disk and it still died. The disk should be independent of the hard drives unless it was trying to use it for virtual memory.

ynori7 wrote: [quote]chess_rock wrote: maybe it's not the motherboard but the hd/s. Try disconnecting your hd/s, and turning your machine on. If it shows problems, then it's the motherboard. If not, then the hd/s is/are probably the problem/s

He said he tried booting from a disk and it still died. The disk should be independent of the hard drives unless it was trying to use it for virtual memory.[/quote]

Still… the computer checks the HDs before loading. I experienced the same problem, and even when i booted, BSOD would appear. And the main problem was one of the hard disks. I'd tell him to give it a try anyway. Just my humble suggestion

@Mouzi, Can you get it to boot at all? If so grab your latest minidump, Zip it up and upload it somewhere. Don't post the dump it will not encode properly, Then I can debug it to see what the cause is.

I sent you the minidump.

The problem seems to be in the ntoskrnl.exe, Which is part of your boot up, Explaining why you can't boot anything. You need to repair it Via chkdsk, Or using sfc scannow (If you have your xp cd)

It gives different .exes as the cause on different minidumps. Besides how could some windows executable cause kubuntu and backtrack to crash?

I tried running memtest86 and it started giving errors at some point so I tried checking if some of the four RAM would be the fault but I'm still not sure since I didn't get any clear results. Some RAM didn't give any errors but didn't boot kubuntu either and some worked alone some didn't. Some won't even let me boot sometimes even if there is one error free with them.

The minidump I debugged showed no signs of hardware failure, (not to say there isn't) But if it's crashing on start-up and you have a bad file it will bsod, Remember the bios is checking all boot files on start up. Not just one anything you have installed.

Still I don't get how a bad file could affect Kubuntu or BackTrack. They won't even let me mount my NTFS partitions by default since I haven't shut down windows clean. And sometimes I can boot into an OS (win or linux) normally but it crashes after a while. Although usually it does it on boot.