BSOD on an older machine - how to diagnose a possible hardware problem

I have an old machine which suddenly started getting BSOD's in Windows 2000 sp4.

I was trying to access a file from a networked machine when suddenly there was a BSOD, saying "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQAL ". The problem is that EVERY trime I would try to boot Win2000 after that resulted in a BSOD shortly after boot.

I tried safe mode without success. Only rarely would it boot, but when it would boot successfully (say 1/10 times) it would stay booted. So I ran Norton Antivirus and it was clean and did the usual checks. Booting from a floppy showed no errors trying to boot.

Anyway - I wanted to swtich hard drives on this for a while so I remove all board except the RAID board, video card and net card. I tried to reinstall Win2000 but kept getting BSODs when it was installed and tried to boot.

I tried swapping RAM chips and cleaning the machine. No luck.

I'm just wondering if the old motherboard finally gave up the ghost. It's not particularly valuable but it's good as a compatability machine and to hold some outdated video hardware (which I removed for the test). What is strange is that the system works fine UNTIL Windows 2000 tries to boot. It works in a DOS boot and in a 2000 install.

Any ideas why it would fail ONLY in Windows 2000? How could a bad MB or CPU do this?

 

can you run the dump tool against a few of these dumps?

 

Would that be helpful for me to post such here?

 

yes. post it in this thread.

 

BIG problem -

The degubwiz file doesn't run in DOS! Since I cannot currently get into windows on this machine I cannot run it. I also cannot pass the file over the network and usually .dmp files are too big for floppies.

Additionally, I did a DOS search booting from floppy and found no .dmp files anywhere.

Ideas?

 

Can you post a boot log?

 

At the risk of sounding naive, "BOOTEX.LOG "?

I could attach it. It's somewhat long.

I noticed that for the first time I had a bunch of crosslinked files; all "mdm*.pnf" files of various flavors (e.g. mdmbsb.pnf,mdmblatz.pnf,mdmatt.pnf etc)

This machine won't be worth TOO much more fussing. In other words, if it has a mysterious hardware problem which can't be solved without a lot of digging, then I might as well retire it. I'm partly curious, however, why it works well in most circumstances but fails when Win2000 starts.