Friday, October 3, 2008

Blue Screen and Ghosting


 

Symptoms

The PC boots and then it blue screens. The PC even blue screens in safe mode. The error message is: Stop 0x000000F4 (0X000000003,0x85f63120, 0x85c8bfc).

Gathering Information

I have not been able to find out a lot about this error. The error seems to be related to memory and page file on the hard drive. The error seems to be related to a critical object being shutdown. Several company advertise that they have a regtool that can fix this error. These tools can't be used because the system will not boot and stay on. This site has useful information on stop codes.

Hypotheses

H1: Memory is bad.

H2: The registry is corrupt and can be fixed using a ghost image from June.

Results

Using MemTest-86 version 3.2, I found no memory errors. H1 is rejected. The memory seems fine. Ghost is a very touch program see the blog on Ghosting issues for details.

H2 fixed the computer. The Ghost image worked fine but Ghost was difficult. I had to simply the computer before it would Ghost. I have to remove a slave hard drive.


 

Reflection

It took several hours to copy photos off the pc. This was using Ghost Rescue Operating systems but it was very slow. I have found that simplifying a system really helps. When I removed that slave hard drive, the Ghost worked. I have seen this troubleshooting method work with network cards and sound cards.

2 comments:

Will said...

I had the same experience with my computer. I frequently got a blue screen. Sometimes just for opening the internet, clicking on something, or at a random point while editing video. My edited videos would also publish corrupt. I just backed up everything on an external hard drive and did an entire system restore and reinstalled Vista. After reinstalling the software and driver that I had, the same problem came back. I thought something was wrong with my computer, but I realized later that I was using a Wi-fi driver that wasn't the right one for Vista, even though i thought it was. I didn't know where to get the right driver, but I had a computer expert get me the right driver and now my computer doesn't crash like that anymore.

Darikamanee said...

First of all, I would like to thank you for this useful information. I remember when I worked as an assistance researcher at the university of technology in my country. I got the same problem. Honestly,at that time I really had no idea about how to fix this problem. I just called the the IT person to come to my office and paid him.

I think when I go back to my country I can use all of my knowledges that I have learned here to do the better job.