Resolved bluescreen - ntvdm.exe image loading failed

Hi there,

when I turned my desktop on this morning, a bluescreen came up telling me that ntvdm.exe can't be loaded because of an image problem. ? Any idea what I should do now ? mounted the win xp cd and tried the repair/recovery option, but it promps me for the admin password, but I didn't set one ... help ?

EDIT: Was thinking about re installing it over the current windows installation, but I don't want to lose the current "My Documents" folder, or should I install it in a differnt folder ? Anything else I should take care in ?
thx

 

If you did not set an admin password did you try just hitting enter and seeing if it will log you on?

Can you post exactly what it says?

I have seen this before when there has been file corruption, bad hardware and a dead bios battery.

If you can get into the recovery console try running a chkdsk /r.

Tom

 

Hi tom,

yeap, i did hit enter, it just told me wrong password and i tried again a few of my standard passwords, third time I entered a wrong password it said it's going to restart. System recovery didn't work because of the pw situation

sry can't remember what it said, something about data corruption, I installed windows again in the meantime, in a different directory and just copied the "fresh ntvdm.exe" over and replaced the malfunctioning one.

Everything is back to normal again I got just one question left, how do I completly remove the second windows installation ? I just deleted it in the past, but I was still left with 2 OS's in the startmenu options

 

I have never been in that situation before to be honest with two installs of xp on the same drive..

You can edit the boot.ini file and remove the entry from there to delete it from the startup menu.

Here is a link to the knowledge base article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/289022

Make sure you make a backup of the original and delete the correct entry as you could end up causing more harm than good.

The boot.ini is a hidden file so you will need to show hidden files in the folder options menu.

If you can live without deleting the entry you can just right click my computer, choose properties, choose the advanced tab, under startup and recovery select settings, make the installation of windows you are using the default os, and then uncheck time to display list of operating systems and click apply.

This would be a safer bet

Tom

 

big thanks mate, helped me alot. hidden files no problem, I'm still using win commander ^