The horrors of a year ago came back when today I noticed that I can't boot windows. The first time I tried booting the load screen was extremely long and came to a blue error screen with something such as a "session 3 init failure" note.

I turned it off and tried to boot in safe mode. The boot failed at the screen where all the components start loading up for windows.

I booted with last known settings and came to the error PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA after an extremely long load screen.

I start up with the BIOS and I noticed an odd message also. it says "IDE Channel 0 no 80 conductor cable installed". I have not opened up the system yet up I am sure that all cables are installed as all my drives and lights work.

I have no HDD backup and would like to avoid going to the shop as much as possible to image my drive.  I have the original XP disk for the system. I would like to pop it in to chose the repair function but I have no clue what it would do.


Please Give any input.

Thanks

I have opened her up and removed one of my two disk drives. The one I removed have been giving me problems since the old system where I reused it. It boots into the normal Windows XP now so I am guessing that the disk drive is the one causing all the problems.

the blue screen.... it's...... beautiful

a1 wrote on May 6^th, 2009 at 11:39pm:



That error is mistaken for a virus and other things all the time..

Although it is possible a bug is in the system more often that not when you see that on initial boot its one of the hardware devices initiating on the buss. How far it makes it into boot can also be a clue

7 times out of 10 its a drive going bad (hard disk or optical) and with the cable message prior to the BSOD posted that kinda tipped me off. The pagefault error is strange.. thats another reason why I went for drive but I would have gone for hard drive over optical with that one.. so you see even from this side it can appear different than it really was..

It can be caused by memory, CPU, hard drives, floppy drive, CD/DVD, and other hard wired devices to the motherboard. I have even seen it with dust clogging the CPU fan badly and as soon as its cleaned.. it works

So you did the right thing with this one.. you snooped it out

NickN wrote on May 6^th, 2009 at 8:08pm:



..and you now are one step closer to being a good computer tech