bsod error message

L

laurie

my daughter turned on her laptop and got the bsod at first it didint have any
messages she was able to boot to windows and received a message that the user
interface faulire in dll.msgnia.dll. then it wouldn't show a display she
tried again and got bsod and this message PSN-list_corrupt. i googled but
the only thing in english i could find was on PFN_list_corrupt. please help
daughter is across state in college and needs laptop to work. she hasn't
changed anything on it and it was working fine up to 3 days ago.

thanks laurie
 
L

laurie

sorry the code is PFN_list_corrupt. which seems to be the memory the laptop
has 2 1 gig sticks of kingston memory so i know it will be replaced for free.
just need to figure out which one is bad. can't run memtest as there is no
floppy installed on laptop and also it wont boot beyond the bsod.
 
J

Jose

sorry the code is PFN_list_corrupt.  which seems to be the memory  the laptop
has 2 1 gig sticks of kingston memory so i know it will be replaced for free.
 just need to figure out which one is bad.  can't run memtest as there is no
floppy installed on laptop and also it wont boot beyond the bsod.

Is the laptop a Presario V4000?

Somehow I think you are going to say there is no CD drive either on
the system, but...

Run a test of your RAM with memtest86+ (I know it is boring and will
cost you a CD).

Memtest86+ is a more up to date version of the old memtest program and
they are not the same.

The memtest86+ will not run under Windows, so you will need to
download the ISO file and create a bootable CD, boot on that and then
run the memtest86+ program.

If even a single error is reported that is a failure and should make
you suspicious of your RAM.

If you have multiple sticks of RAM you may need to run the test on
them one at a time and change them out to isolate the failure to a
particular single stick. Always keep at least the first bank of RAM
occupied so the test will find something to do and there is enough to
boot your system.

Sometimes, reseating the RAM in the slots will relieve the error but a
failure is still cause for suspicion.

The file and instructions are here:

http://www.memtest.org/

If someone says to run memtest86, you can say that you know memtest86+
supercedes memtest86 and here's why:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memtest86
 
Y

Yousuf Khan

laurie said:
my daughter turned on her laptop and got the bsod at first it didint have any
messages she was able to boot to windows and received a message that the user
interface faulire in dll.msgnia.dll. then it wouldn't show a display she
tried again and got bsod and this message PSN-list_corrupt. i googled but
the only thing in english i could find was on PFN_list_corrupt. please help
daughter is across state in college and needs laptop to work. she hasn't
changed anything on it and it was working fine up to 3 days ago.

Has your daughter tried to boot into Windows Safe Mode? If the problem
still happens when in Safe Mode, then it's likely bad RAM. If the
problem doesn't happen in Safe Mode, then the problem may be caused by a
faulty device driver.

As others have pointed out, try to run Memtest86+ on the machine. One
easy way to get this Memtest is to download a Linux Live CD of Ubuntu,
or other Linux distro, they usually come with Memtest86+ by default to
test for bad RAM. You can run it straight off of the CD drive, you won't
have to install the operating system to the hard disk.

And if it passes the Memtest, then you can try to see if it boots into
Linux without any incidence too. If it goes to Linux without a problem,
then the problem is confirmed that it's a Windows device driver problem.

Yousuf Khan
 

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