System Crash - Need Help
 

Argh....my pc crashed last night and will not reboot properly. Hopefull someone knows something that can help.

I was playing Mafia when another program interupted and stopped the game. I addressed the interuption and was about to moveon when I noticed that mafia was still running minimized. I tried to open it again and my system froze. cntr-alt-del, task manager would not shut down mafia or my pc. Reset button. Computer reboots, bios gives a warning about front side bus, etc, reduce it back to factory (remove overclocking). Continue boot up, win2k splash screen and then blue screen flashes and pc tries to reboot. Repeat process with out going back into bios. Continues in same loop non stop.

After many rotations and gleening one word at a time of the blue screen that flashes for maybe 1/4 a second, the error message says:

Starting physical memory dump.
Physical memory dump complete.
Please contact network admin or yada yada yada.

win2k repair disc does not work.

Physical memeory means hard drvie, right?

I am now stumped. I have considered removing hte hdd and installing it as a slave on my second pc to see if I can access the harddrive. I have some files that I dont want to lose, mostly photos. After that, I can reformat if needed, but I would rather not.

Anyone have any ideas on how to get out of this loop? I thnk the blue screen has a very long error number but I cant read it, it flashes too fast. Anyone know how ot freeze this panel to read teh number?

Help please!!! cry:

Re: System Crash - Need Help
 

I think hitting space should freeze the screen so you can read it. Sounds like somethings screwed over pretty bad though. Does it not boot in safe mode even?

I will have to try the space bar.

Yeah, it crashed hard. It was a very stable system up until this. It just into some screwy loop. It is trying to boot in safe mode.

Does it even reach safe mode? If you can manage to go into safe mode, then you can re-boot properly and restore your pc. I'll talk to a friend I know who knows alot about this and see what he says. Catch you later.

btw physical memory is your ram. Sounds as if somethings just bombed the operating system. Might need to try a reinstall.

Moved to Offtopic.

Sounds pretty drastic, you'll have to do what you suggested.

Pull the drive out, bung it in your second machine as slave, tear the files off it and re-install to your primary machine.

It might be worth giving Safe Mode a try but I wouldn't bank on it working, besides, your PC will never feel the same again. Despite all the rants I hear about XP Pro I've had it running on my system now for 18 months and it hasn't BSOD'd me once! (Touch wood!) - Good luck!

Thanks. If I have to reformat, I very well might go with XP. I have liked 2k so far, but this is not a good sign. I ahve found a few things out from some searches on the error message, but I suck at decifering microsoft speak. It seems like it might be a conflict between devices, possibly the usb drivers. The memory dump, as far as I can tell is trying to recover data off the ram. I have a couple of things I may try first, and i need to scour my bios to make sure it hasnt reset something that is causing a conflict.

We get physical memory dumps here at work all the time. You fried the BIOS settings for the mobo on the hard drive. Only way to fix it is rebuild the PC. You CAN use a different hard drive, then once the OS is back up, plug in the HD as a slave, and retrieve your data.

[quote="Bazooka_Joe":a9b9f]We get physical memory dumps here at work all the time. You fried the BIOS settings for the mobo on the hard drive. Only way to fix it is rebuild the PC. You CAN use a different hard drive, then once the OS is back up, plug in the HD as a slave, and retrieve your data.[/quote:a9b9f]

That sounds reasonable and somewhat reassuring. Are you saying I cannot reset my BIOS settings at startup?

While I would like to get my system back in full, my main concern is that I dont lose things that cant be replaced, like family photos. I just thought about burning a backup of my photo directory the other day and put it off. Ughh.....hindsite.

[quote=pest]That sounds reasonable and somewhat reassuring. Are you saying I cannot reset my BIOS settings at startup?

While I would like to get my system back in full, my main concern is that I dont lose things that cant be replaced, like family photos. I just thought about burning a backup of my photo directory the other day and put it off. Ughh.....hindsite.[/quote:aafc6]

Nah, it's not a BIOS setting, it's information about your system board & communication controls stored on your hard drive, those files were fried. It's not something that can be restored through BIOS, even upgrading the BIOS with a FlashROM won't fix it.

Yes, you can get all of your original data back, you just need a 2nd HD to use to install the OS again.

Well, I was wanting a new second hd anyway. Maybe I need to do a little shopping. I wonder if the Best buy/staples/compuusa raping is worth avoiding the online delivery time.

If you got the cash, go for it. I'm the kind of guy that can wait three days if my PC crashes, then I gotta fix it ASAP, heh