Resolved A blue screen I have never seen!

Went over to my Ma's house and her computer was in a boot loop. It would get to the progress bar and then restart.. Finally got it going and checked the event viewer. It had a bunch of 9Cs, As, and a D1. Went to properties and configured it to stop restarting on errors and this is what the bsod looks like. I'm pretty sure it's a failing hard drive. Since this is a clone and not a proprietary system I was expecting a normal blue screen. It also would bsod when running West Digitals hard drive diag tool

 

Good morning Mr Omo. That is the completer blue screen--well, the word "Call" from the line "your hardware vendor for support" was cut off due to my cheap camera phone.

It would not complete phase 2 of disk error checking. Eventually, it did. Chkdsk /f fixed some minor orphaned files. The Western Digital HD diags is what's concerning to me. It blue screens at the 50% mark. The drive is 8 years old and is a Western Digital 40 gigabyte. This machine is so old, the install disk is XP SP 2. New hard drive will work fine

Regards

 

Might give seatools a try. I 'm inclined to buy the cheapest IDE my local shop has so she can resume her activities on the computer which doesn't amount to much more than email and printing out mapquest maps

Thanks for your opinion

Regards

 

Absolutely stunned.. I was convinced the HD was bad due to the fact it wouldnt complete the Western Digital life guard diagnostic, and the fact it would sometimes do a boot loop due to not finding the HD.

I installed a new HD, formatted, and then installed the O/S.. Booted--same **** again. It would stall on the progress bar or throw a 0x9c--MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION.

So for jokes, I put in a Linux live CD and it wouldnt boot either. Gave me the
"Kernel panic - not syncing: CPU context corrupt" message

The machine is'nt overclocked--just a generic P4

I looked at the capacitors on the mobo and it appears several of them are bulging and some have a small amount of crud coming out of the top where the folds are.

It's been fun this weekend

 

The first thing I did was run a memtest and after a dozen passes, that's when I decided to look at the motherboard and a couple located next to the CPU were'nt flat on the top with a minute amount of electrolyte gathering at the peak of the folds. I'm guessing when there is high stress on the CPU, that's when it gets flakey.

Regards