Continuous problems with BSOD's, need help badly!

Hello all, 2 days ago I started to have repeated issues with BSOD's, including 4 or 5 different types. I either would randomly BSOD after a few minutes or crash upon trying to enter windows past the login screen through various problems.

After perhaps 75-100 BSODs in the past few days, when I try and launch Windows now it tells me the system file is corrupt and to try and use the repair installation to fix it. I made a bootdisk on this PC and after booting up, whenever I attempt to access the d:\i386 directory now of my Windows XP CD, it says "Invalid directory." The directory is obviously there and is accessible in this computer and all other directories are accesible on the computer that is in need of repair except for that one in particular. I am totally at a loss, does anyone have an idea of how I can get into the i386 directory to attempt to repair my Windows? Thanks!

 

Why not set your BIOS so that booting from a CD is the top option and then boot from the CD?

I imagine your boot disk is from an older windows version so probably isn't a real good idea to use for XP repair anyway.

 

After having used memtest86, it does appear one of my sticks of RAM has gone bad. Hopefully Crucial has longer than a year warranty. I'll have to try and isolate which stick has gone bad, perhaps then I will have some better success.

As for booting off the cd, for some reason my BIOS does not allow for that even I select my DVD-ROM or CD-RW drives as first in the order under the 'Boot' area, instead it just skips directly over them. The only choices it responds to are a floppy disk or HDD being selected first. I am using the ASUS provided BIOS, I believe it is called Rev 120B or something along those lines.

 

Memtest86 was correct and it was indeed a stick of bad memory, so I isolated the faulty stick and am going to call up Crucial to get a replacement. I ended up having to reformat my drive unfortunately and am in the process of testing the other stick just to be safe. After I reformatted last night I kept getting BSOD's even upon trying to re-install so I knew it must be the RAM at the source. Hopefully that is all it will turn out to be.

Thanks again for the help, will post if I have any other problems.