Stop 0x0000004E

I'm trying to help a friend get his daughter's pc going again. She was having some problems with it so he decided to reformat and reinstall XP again. He was having some problems with it blue screening so he came to me for help.

I deleted the partition and recreated it, formatted the drive and started the install. All was going well until the first restart after the files are copied. As soon as the next install screen pops up, it blue screens with this error;

Stop 0x0000004E
PFN_LIST_CORRUPT

The only MS article I could find on this had to do with audio playback or trying to capture video, which doesn't fit. This is an Asrock mboard with a Sempron 3000 cpu and 1.5 Gig. of ram. The board has onboard video, sound, lan, of which only video is on at the moment. The others are disabled in BIOS. I flashed the BIOS to the latest available as well.

Has anyone seen this error before or have any ideas on why it might be happening?

 

Hi Pete,

I just found that same error description a few minutes ago myself, probably should have searched some more before posting. I've been suspecting ram myself, but the memory diag test was clean. I put in two PC2700 sticks that I knew to be good and the PC just keeps rebooting after the windows splash screen. I'm not sure what's going on with this thing, maybe the cpu? I ran the Western Digital diags on the hard drive and it came up clean too.

 

Asrock (Asus) motherboards can be finicky with certain brands of memory. Check their website (also finicky) for recommended brands for that board.

 

Problem solved!

Turns out it was the on-board video causing the problem. Since the on-board video uses part of the system ram, I decided to try using an agp video card to see if that would make any difference (didn't know what else to try). When I powered up the machine it recognized the agp card right away and it went right back into the install process as if nothing had happened. The machine is now up and running fine on the separate video card.

This was a new one for me and something I'll mark down for future reference.