System Hardware:
Dell Dimension 8300 Pentium 4 3.2ghz / 2gb RAM / Seagate Sata: 120gb and 200gb, Seagate 500mb external eSata via Promise eSata PCI card, Nvidia 6200, etc.
Windows XP SP2 (Dell OEM) with latest updates as of July 2007.
Origin: Power Outage (OK, I admit that I’m a klutz and that I accidentally hit the power strip power switch, while I was crawling around behind the PC, plugging in a printer)
Subsequently:
When I boot XP I’m getting a BSOD with the usual warning and then this Stop message:
STOP 0x0000007B (0xBACBF524, 0xC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000).
In normal boot, this appears a few seconds after the Windows logo.
In Safe mode it shows a couple of dozen drivers being loaded but it crashes after dontgo.sys. (this is the Promise eSata controller driver).
Using Recovery Console, disabling dontgo.sys and removing the Promise eSata card, it still crashes immediately after the previous driver ( agp44.sys) is displayed. Disabling agp44.sys has crash after the next previous driver, etc. Also removed the Promise controller.
I moved the boot drive to a very similar system and it behaved exactly the same way.
Here’s some other things that I’ve discovered about the current state of the system:
Extensive testing has not indicated any drive or hardware problems.
When booting from a Windows boot CD (see below) the file systems on all drives appear to be fine.
I get the same behavior in all XP boot modes (Safe, Last Known, etc.)
I tried some utilities that restored previous Registry states – no change. Note that this was not a full System Restore i.e. it didn’t restore DLLs, etc.).
Questions:
Is there anyway to determine (even approximately) the loading order of drivers? It seems that if I could determine the next driver that is going to be loaded after the last one is displayed in Safe mode, I would know where the problem is stemming from. Is that a reasonable assumption?
Does the fact that the whole range of Windows boot options are available and that these two dozen or so drivers are apparently being loaded as displayed in Safe Mode, indicate that the problem is NOT with the boot configurations and that the problem is within the Windows configuration? Or could there still be boot/mbr problems?
I have avoided trying fixmbr via the Recovery Console, out of a concern for messing up Dell’s proprietary partitions, etc. What would be worst case with trying fixmbr, bootcfg, etc? I tried enabling boot logging but that apparently doesn’t kick in before it crashes.
Is there any way to run a full System Restore on a non-booting Win install? Why oh why doesn’t System Restore run from Recovery Console? Is is possible to examine the Restore points and manually recreate a System Restore?
The MS web site seems to indicate that it’s possible via WMI scripting to do a remote System Restore. Does that mean it will work on a non-booting installation or does that mean that it will only work on a remote, running windows system?
My current next step is a Windows Repair Install, which may work but will leave the Windows in an out of date state and require a lot of updating and then it still may not be completely stable. Last resort is a complete reformat and reinstall. But before I do that I’d like to see if I’ve exhausted all simpler approaches.
All of the files are backed up, so I’m not in a panic about losing data. OTOH, resorting to a complete XP reinstall is very unappealing. It would take many days, even weeks, to reinstall and configure all of the software.
Any suggestions or guidance would be greatly appreciated!
-Kenny
