Thanks muchly to Will Denny, S. Sengupta, usasma and Rock for your
responses.
I've had a bad couple of days :-( ...the DVI input on my lovely 8 month old
19" LCD panel died yesterday and it'll only work on the 15 pin-D-sub
analogue port (swapped out graphics card to known good one to prove monitor
DVI input has indeed died), and it's HORRID on analogue ! ....my Goodman's
Active PC speakers died today but, that's my upstairs problems ...I digress
!
Downstairs - Dads system box:-
Foxconn 760GXK8MC-S_RS
Skt754 2800 Sempron / 512mb pc2700 / 80gb Seagate
MX440 AGP card / WMP54g pci Linksys wireless card
LG Combo (dvd reader/cd rewriter)
....is the one that went BSOD with:-
*** STOP: 0x000000C2 (0x00000043, 0xC2264000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)
....and I wonder if this is how it was caused ? ...
A couple of months ago when I assembled and installed this PC, I popped in a
spare 40gb WD hd as Slave to IDE0, and Ghosted C:\ onto it, and left it
disconnected in the box - to reduce noise. At that time it had a Bewan ADSL
pci modem in it. That was uninstalled and removed a couple of weeks ago
when I put a WMP54G into it. ...also relevant, if you bear with me for
few a seconds, is that initially the box was using the onboard graphics chip
and a couple of weeks later I ended up with a spare MX440 - so I popped that
into Dads PC.
All was fine until today, I needed that WD 40gb HD and took it out, and
here's where I'm sure the BSOD somehow came from. Whilst plugging the
leads back in, I connected the monitor 15pin D-sub to the onboard graphics
port instead of the AGP card ! I quickly realised what I'd done | shut down
| and connected onto the "proper" card but, nogo !
B & W DOS message at startup = "Windows could not start because the
following file is missing or corrupt:\WINNT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM" ...I
think that's the one, just pinched it from an MS page !
BSOD every time. This board auto detects the presence of a card in the AGP
slot, so how this produced a problem eludes me, unless of course it was just
coincidence and my hive went BANG on shutdown or something like that. I
wonder if BSOD contributors could have been motherboard features
"Superboot," "Superbios Protect," Cache bios" and "Cache Video."
I tweaked and fiddled for ages, turned off all the above in bios - couldn't
boot in any of the [F5] dos screen modes - booting from the original XP Home
SP2 OEM (unflavoured) wouldn't let me in, i.e. "r" = BSOD ...and trying to
get that later choice of a repair install by threatening to install onto the
current C:\Windows [1] =BSOD. ...cleared CMOS ...again made sure all bios
caching was off = BSOD Booted using a full retail XP Home SP2 | [r] = BSOD
No data recovery needed, (Dad only uses it occasionally on the internet), so
I deleted the MBR and reinstalled.
Anyway, what a sh***y OS start up design, and totally useless fault
tolerance and recovery !!
....totally unable to get to dos prompt using the XP Home ed. SP2 cd !
regards, Richard
, ...unhappy experience was what I got with