Multiple Inspiron 6000 Problems

[keving98]

I am working on an Inspiron 6000 that began crashing with blue screens
(c000021a; stop:0x0000000A; among
others). Hopefully someone out there has experienced a similar problem
and can save me from buying my second
replacement motherboard.

No software or hardware changes were made immediately prior to problem.

Here are the steps I've taken:

I suspected either a corrupt system file or a failing hard drive so I
thought I would start by
running "chkdsk /r" but couldn't get past the first 10 seconds of 6
different XP and Windows
2000 install disks, all factory burned disks.

Replaced DVD drive with two (2) different working CDRom drives from
other machines with the
same result. With Windows XP it consistently stops with the error:

"File \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded.
The error code is 7

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

Windows 2000 install disk stops with a different error at about the
same point.

I even got a blue screen booting with a BartPE disk after it had fully
loaded (only tried it
once).

Tried pressing F5 to disable ACPI during install with no luck.

Tried disabling everything non-essential in the bios with no luck.

Booted with the keyboard removed and an external keyboard - no joy.

Booted with an external monitor with no luck.

Ran the built-in Dell diagnostics and everything passed including about
12 hours of the memory
tests with the exception of something about the "Real Time Clock 32 bit
crystal" (paraphrasing).

Replaced the (2) 256mb DDR2 memory sticks with (1) 512 DDR2 memory
stick with the same results.

Replaced the motherboard with one purchased on eBay and every single
issue, every single error,
at the exact same points remain as if I never even opened the case.

Maybe worth mentioning: Two different times I reset the bios (once with
each motherboard) to the factory defaults and when I tried booting to
the hard drive immediately after it would take me to the point of
loading the desktop and then crash with the stop:

"stop: c000021a {Fatal System Error}The Windows Logon Process system
process terminated
unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000005 (0x00000000 0x00000000).The
system has been shut
down."

Any other time I would boot to the hard disk it would crash before or
during the XP logo screen.

The only thing that hasn't been replaced is the processor and the LCD.

Is it possible I got a replacement motherboard with the EXACT same
issues?

Is it my processor (nothing on the processor looks obviously swelled or
damaged)?

Is God punishing me or is there something obvious I'm missing (yes and
maybe?)?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Kevin G

 

[Rod Speed]

I am working on an Inspiron 6000 that began crashing with blue screens
(c000021a; stop:0x0000000A; among
others). Hopefully someone out there has experienced a similar
problem and can save me from buying my second
replacement motherboard.

No software or hardware changes were made immediately prior to
problem.

Here are the steps I've taken:

I suspected either a corrupt system file or a failing hard drive so I
thought I would start by
running "chkdsk /r" but couldn't get past the first 10 seconds of 6
different XP and Windows
2000 install disks, all factory burned disks.

Replaced DVD drive with two (2) different working CDRom drives from
other machines with the
same result. With Windows XP it consistently stops with the error:

"File \i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded.
The error code is 7

Setup cannot continue. Press any key to exit."

Windows 2000 install disk stops with a different error at about the
same point.

I even got a blue screen booting with a BartPE disk after it had fully
loaded (only tried it
once).

Tried pressing F5 to disable ACPI during install with no luck.

Tried disabling everything non-essential in the bios with no luck.

Booted with the keyboard removed and an external keyboard - no joy.

Booted with an external monitor with no luck.

Ran the built-in Dell diagnostics and everything passed including
about 12 hours of the memory
tests with the exception of something about the "Real Time Clock 32
bit crystal" (paraphrasing).

Replaced the (2) 256mb DDR2 memory sticks with (1) 512 DDR2 memory
stick with the same results.

Replaced the motherboard with one purchased on eBay and every single
issue, every single error,
at the exact same points remain as if I never even opened the case.

Maybe worth mentioning: Two different times I reset the bios (once
with each motherboard) to the factory defaults and when I tried
booting to the hard drive immediately after it would take me to the
point of loading the desktop and then crash with the stop:

"stop: c000021a {Fatal System Error}The Windows Logon Process system
process terminated
unexpectedly with a status of 0xc0000005 (0x00000000 0x00000000).The
system has been shut
down."

Any other time I would boot to the hard disk it
would crash before or during the XP logo screen.

The only thing that hasn't been replaced is the processor and the LCD.

Have you swapped the power supply ?

Is it possible I got a replacement motherboard with the EXACT same issues?

Yes, particularly if they have had a bad caps problem.

Have you checked both boards for that visually ?

Is it my processor (nothing on the processor looks obviously swelled or damaged)?

Very unlikely. They usually work or are dead.

Is God punishing me or is there something obvious I'm missing (yes and maybe?)?

You're being punished for your furious drunken grave dancing. You were warned...

It does look a bad motherboard, if you have swapped the power supply.
It could be a subtle power supply fault if you havent, like a lot of ripple on the rails etc.

 

[keving98]

Thanks for the response.

Yes, particularly if they have had a bad caps problem.

When you say bad caps do you mean distorted chips on the board?

Have you swapped the power supply ?

I get the same behavior whether the laptop is on AC or on battery.

You're being punished for your furious drunken grave dancing. You were warned...

Nobody told me that I couldn't, just that I shouldn't.

Kevin G

 

[Rod Speed]

Thanks for the response.

When you say bad caps do you mean distorted chips on the board?

No, caps are usually blue or black plastic covereded tube like things
that stick up vertically from the motherboard surface. The tops should
be flat. If any have bulged or have leaked, those are bad caps.

I get the same behavior whether the laptop is on AC or on battery.

Thats a pretty convincing result that that isnt the problem.

Nobody told me that I couldn't, just that I shouldn't.

And now you have discovered why you shouldnt.

That sort of unspeakable behaviour makes your laptop curl
up and die in the most disasterous and unfixable fashion.

 

[paulmd]

Thanks for the response.

Just to clarify:
How about AC with the battery removed?

 

[keving98]

I can't believe I didn't try it before but pulling the battery didn't
solve the problems.

As far as the "bad caps" possibility, I'm not sure about the marks on
the one cap present. Below is a link to an image of the cap if anyone
cares to take a look (It's 600 dpi so if you save it to your computer
and zoom in you can see it more clearly than I can with the naked
eye).

http://www.cageynet.com/bad_cap_01.tif

Thanks,

Kevin G

 

[paulmd]

I can't believe I didn't try it before but pulling the battery didn't
solve the problems.

As far as the "bad caps" possibility, I'm not sure about the marks on
the one cap present. Below is a link to an image of the cap if anyone
cares to take a look (It's 600 dpi so if you save it to your computer
and zoom in you can see it more clearly than I can with the naked
eye).

http://www.cageynet.com/bad_cap_01.tif

I can't tell if there's a bulge from this angle.... It LOOKS ok, but
can you get one that's not dead perpendicular, so to reveal any bulges
better?

Have you ran memtest86+ on it, and tested the hard drive with the
manufacturer's tool?

If the manufacturer's tool crashes... that may be a sign of either
problem. Also... if you have spares handy, you might swap out RAM or
the hard drive anyway. I've had bad ram and hard drives both that
passed diagnostics that were nevertheless the problem.

But don't spend money on a blind swap.

If it ain't either one, i'd dump it, given it's repair history and
refusal to stay stable.

As a last resort, navigate to support.dell.com and locate firmware for
your model. There are bios updates available, and also firmware for
several models of hard drives and cdroms.

The firmware for the western digital hard drives is listed as urgent.
(Only apply it if you have the model hard drives it applies to, of
course)

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/devices.aspx?
c=us&l=en&s=gen&SystemID=INS_PNT_6000&os=WW1&osl=EN

 

[kony]

I can't believe I didn't try it before but pulling the battery didn't
solve the problems.

As far as the "bad caps" possibility, I'm not sure about the marks on
the one cap present. Below is a link to an image of the cap if anyone
cares to take a look (It's 600 dpi so if you save it to your computer
and zoom in you can see it more clearly than I can with the naked
eye).

http://www.cageynet.com/bad_cap_01.tif

I would wonder if these boards are prone to some problem and
the reason the other was on ebay was due to this.

I don't see anything wrong with that cap though, and to save
others' download time you might use JPG or at least PNG
format as the former could be set to a higher quality
setting and still reduce filesize by about 90%.

The "\i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded" message can be
from bios settings or memory problems. Although Memtest86+
might find problems, rarely it can miss them and if possible
you might try other memory, and check on a bios update.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/318729

You might also check in the Dell forums,
Google will find a few in addition to the main one at Dell's
site.

 

[keving98]

I would wonder if these boards are prone to some problem and
the reason the other was on ebay was due to this.

Had crossed my mind.

...and to save others' download time you might use JPG or at least PNG

format as the former could be set to a higher quality setting and
still reduce filesize by about 90%.

Wasn't thinking. If someone wanted to print the image it would come
out great though.

The "\i386\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded" message can be from bios settings or memory problems. Although Memtest86+

might find problems, rarely it can miss them and if possible you might
try other memory, and check on a bios update.

I haven't tried Memtest86+, but as I stated, I ran Dell's built-in
memory diagnostic for about 10 hours with no problems reported. I
have tried other memory and the bios is the most recent version (A09).

You might also check in the Dell forums, Google will find a few in addition to the main one at Dell's site.

I did post to the Dell forums and everyone who replied thinks that
format and restoring is the solution to all my problems.

Thanks for the response.

Kevin G

 

[kony]

format as the former could be set to a higher quality setting and
still reduce filesize by about 90%.

Wasn't thinking. If someone wanted to print the image it would come
out great though.

It is true a lossly compression format is hypothetically
worse, but in moderate (for our purposes, on-screen display)
resolutions a high quality JPEG is quite good, it takes a
careful examination with the two images side-by-side to
(barely) tell a difference. The other things a HQ JPEG does
by reducing filesize is to allow an even higher resolution
to be a manageable download. However, in this case the cap
looked ok, there is a slight chance we can't see the problem
because of the angle but it seems unlikely due to the
uniform pattern of the machining and light reflection on the
top of it - it looks flat.

might find problems, rarely it can miss them and if possible you might
try other memory, and check on a bios update.

I haven't tried Memtest86+, but as I stated, I ran Dell's built-in
memory diagnostic for about 10 hours with no problems reported. I
have tried other memory and the bios is the most recent version (A09).

I'd run memtest86+, it is doubtful Dell's is as thorough.
It should run for several hours ideally, though a problem
bad enough to stop an install every time would probably
produce some errors within a few passes (it just loops
indefinitely, the test stops when you tell it to).

I did post to the Dell forums and everyone who replied thinks that
format and restoring is the solution to all my problems.

Well you do get that mentality far too often when dealing
with OEMs, or OEMs customers told that by OEMs, or
pseudo-experts that hang out on the forums and relay the
same advice given already.

The general presumption is it must be the user's fault or OS
fault, it couldn't be the hardware. Nice (not!) way for an
OEM to handle support, making the user spend so much time
trying to catch everything else before dealing with hardware
potentially being bad, but on the other hand it can be
software and that is often easier, quicker, cheaper to fix
if someone can DIY instead of sending it off to a
technician.

I would probably try a test installation of a standard WinXP
or Win2k, not a Dell restore. I was under the impression
you'd tried that though, and a different optical drive(s),
so the possibilities are more limited. I might also (as a
test) try booting to DOS via bootable CD and making a FAT32
partition on the drive (a 2nd partition if you want to keep
WinXP as NTFS... some people do, some don't) then copy the
WinXP files to a folder on that partition, then try
installing Windows from HDD (if the boot disc loads
Smartdrive it will go a lot faster, Google will provide info
on how to do that if you need a guide).

Otherwise I'd take another look at the CPU 'sink, in case it
wasn't seating good on the CPU that could tend to cause
problems under higher load like when decompressing files
during an image restoration or new installation from
original Windows setup files.

If there is some bios setting that needs changed, a Dell
forum would be the best place to find out about that, or
perhaps another newsgroup/search.

 

[keving98]

It was the Intel Speedstep setting in the bios all along. I'm could
have swore I disabled that earlier but apparently not. All issues
disappeared when this was disabled. What a f-ing cluster-f this has
been. I installed XP Media Center from the Dell recovery partition,
installed all XP updates and tried re-enabling the Speedstep option in
the bios for the hell of it - instant blue screen. I didn't note the
blue screen specifics.

Does having to disable Speedstep indicate any particular sickness? I
can understand Speedstep causing an install process to become unstable
but what would make it suddenly destabilize an OS that's been running
stable for a year?

Also, after installing the Intel video driver update through Windows
Update I got a blue screen indicating "ialmrnt5" (Intel video) got
caught in a loop. I installed the most recent Intel driver from Dell
and after rebooting I got a message saying the system recovered from a
serious error and after sending in the error report to MS the report
came back indicating it was a video driver problem. I downloaded the
newest driver from Intel but it would not install telling me to get
the driver from the manufacturer. I believe this video instability is
somehow related to the instability exposed by Speedstep.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Kevin G

 

[paulmd]

It was the Intel Speedstep setting in the bios all along. I'm could
have swore I disabled that earlier but apparently not. All issues
disappeared when this was disabled. What a f-ing cluster-f this has
been. I installed XP Media Center from the Dell recovery partition,
installed all XP updates and tried re-enabling the Speedstep option in
the bios for the hell of it - instant blue screen. I didn't note the
blue screen specifics.

Does having to disable Speedstep indicate any particular sickness? I
can understand Speedstep causing an install process to become unstable
but what would make it suddenly destabilize an OS that's been running
stable for a year?

F'd up hardware or new drivers. Being as it's speedstep, it COULD be
the processor. But it finally works now, I wouldn't put money into
applying new hardware (cost of repair is getting close to cost of new
laptop).

Also, after installing the Intel video driver update through Windows
Update I got a blue screen indicating "ialmrnt5" (Intel video) got
caught in a loop. I installed the most recent Intel driver from Dell
and after rebooting I got a message saying the system recovered from a
serious error and after sending in the error report to MS the report
came back indicating it was a video driver problem. I downloaded the
newest driver from Intel but it would not install telling me to get
the driver from the manufacturer. I believe this video instability is
somehow related to the instability exposed by Speedstep.

Any ideas?

Drivers from windows update are notoriously bad... It could be that
the "recovering from a serious error" was related to the bluescreen
which you fixed.

If it happens again, worry. For right now, just keep an eye out for
future wonkiness. .

 

[keving98]

I just noticed the processor is running at 600Mhz, the speed is
supposed to be 1.7Ghz.

F.

Kevin G

 

[paulmd]

Possible double post.

I just noticed the processor is running at 600Mhz, the speed is
supposed to be 1.7Ghz.

F.

AAAGGG. That would mean speedstep is now enabled. Despite supposedly
being disabled. Twice. So: is the machine losing BIOS settings? Lucky
for you, this one uses the standard coin cell. Lots of laptops have
some special thing going on. It's a $3 part, at most you'll be
overcharged for it is $5. It's an over the counter part you can often
find at grocery stores, and any place that sells batteries. Go and
replace it anyway.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/ins6000/en/sm/
coincell.htm#wp1123661


Get prime95 to peg the cpu at full throttle, at some point this should
force the higher clockspeed. And it's a really good stress test
overall. Not a bad idea to run it overnight.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime95

http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm
http://mersenne.org/gimps/p95v2414.exe

 

[keving98]

The bios is retaining settings. When Speedstep is disabled, according
to the bios, the processor is placed in the lowest performance state
(600Mhz).
The bios actually shows the processor as being 600Mhz.

I'm going to try and run prime95 to stress the system but I'm not sure
how it can force a system to run at 1.7Ghz when the system thinks it's
ceiling is 600Mhz.

Kevin G

 

[keving98]

BTW, the STOP message the last time I enabled Speedstep was:

stop: 0x0000000a (0xf138ccbc,

Kevin G

 

[paulmd]

The bios is retaining settings. When Speedstep is disabled, according
to the bios, the processor is placed in the lowest performance state
(600Mhz).
The bios actually shows the processor as being 600Mhz.

I'm going to try and run prime95 to stress the system but I'm not sure
how it can force a system to run at 1.7Ghz when the system thinks it's
ceiling is 600Mhz.

Kevin G

Speedstep works to reduce power consumption and heat generation by not
running at full clock speed when there's no need for it. AMD has a
similar feature called Cool 'n' Quiet.

Therefor, in order to see it in action, you can play with programs
like this, that put the cpu under load.

Have a look around in the bios for other cpu related things. I think
some dells have a slower "compatible" setting for the cpu as well.
Don't know if your Inspiron is one of them. Should be 2 settings
"normal" and 'compatible'

Running out of ideas here. Your laptop is possessed. next I'll be
recommending animal sacrifice.

 

[keving98]

Speedstep works to reduce power consumption and heat generation by not
running at full clock speed when there's no need for it. AMD has a
similar feature called Cool 'n' Quiet.

Therefor, in order to see it in action, you can play with programs
like this, that put the cpu under load.

Have a look around in the bios for other cpu related things. I think
some dells have a slower "compatible" setting for the cpu as well.
Don't know if your Inspiron is one of them. Should be 2 settings
"normal" and 'compatible'

Running out of ideas here. Your laptop is possessed. next I'll be
recommending animal sacrifice.

I bought a brand new CPU off Ebay and everything is working now.

What does not kill me will only make me stronger (or more violent).

Thanks for all the help everyone.

Kevin G

 

[paulmd]

I bought a brand new CPU off Ebay and everything is working now.

What does not kill me will only make me stronger (or more violent).

Thanks for all the help everyone.

Kevin G

You're welcome, glad to know you got it working.