OK, I’m not a noob to this at all, so please read this entire post before answering, because I have already tried all of the obvious answers.
I had a machine that went into a constant reboot cycle,rebooting no matter what when it hit a certain point in the boot cycle (it think it was when it loaded mup.sys. It turned out in the long run the computer had a bad RAM slot (#1), but that was only after trouble shooting for a while and installing a new system (XP sp 2) on a new hard drive. The machine is running OK now, but it seems like it may be on its last legs – and I think it’s the mobo.
The problem is with the hard drive that was in the system. It’s a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 40 Gig. It was running fine with winxp pro xp2 (with all the latest patches) until the reboot cycle problem.
No matter what I do with the hard drive, it will crash any system it comes in contact with no matter how it is attached.
I always get the same BSOD with the error 0x00000024, and a message stating that there is a problem with my ntfs.sys.
Here’s what I’ve tried so far, all with the same result:
-> Booting from windows xp cd – crashes at ‘Starting Windows’
-> Boot to safe mode – crashes immediately
-> Boot to safe mode with command prompt – crashes immediately
-> Last know good configuration – crashes immediately
-> Boot using Bart’s PE – crashes halfway through boot
-> Attaching the drive as a slave on the IDE to a different computer with a clean, running system (XP sp2) as master
-> Attaching the drive using a USB HD housing to a number of different machines running XP SP2. When the machine reads the drive the whole system crashes.
This is totally weird to me and I was wondering if anybody has ever had the same issue.
Additionally can anybody tell me if there is a way to skip the ntfs.sys while booting for just that drive? Or some way to isolate the drive that I am not aware of?
Thanks in advance for any help!