XP won't boot, and won't reinstall either...

Hi there.

One of the computers I have here suddenly stopped working. It's a 3 or 4-year-old Dell that has been fine up until now.

(Oddly, the morning that I found it couldn't boot I also found that the LCD monitor attached to it was broken and would not display anything - an old spare CRT I connected works fine however. I don't know if this is connected but I felt it worth mentioning.)

Booting Windows XP gets a bluescreen with STOP 0x00000024. Safe mode gets the same. In these sorts of cases I would try repairing Windows XP, or reinstalling it. However when I run Windows XP installer (booting from the CD) it does not seem to recognize the hard drive. I know the hard drive is working to some extent because it it does start booting Windows XP (though it bluescreens, obv). The hard drive is there. The diagnostic tools built into the bios or whatever seem to recognize the hard drive too. Why won't Windows installer?

If you have any ideas, I'd appreciate it. If you know a workaround that bypasses re-installation, that would be nice too.

 

STOP 0x00000024, 0X0000024, 0X24, NTFS_FILE_SYS Error Code

 

Thanks for the help people.

1) The recovery console won't run because it can't detect Windows XP on any hard drive, probably for the same reason I can't reinstall or repair.

2) While this computer does have a floppy drive, none of my others do. Is there a way to get this NTFS4DOS thing to write the files I need to a USB drive or CD or something?

 

Oh yes, I forgot to mention that the boot disc I made of the manufacturer's diagnostic thingamajig (Samsung) caused the system to hang on a black screen.

But not trusting Nero, I decided to burn it again in a different program and just now it seems to work. I'll let you know how it goes (I'm sure you're at the edge of your seat in excitement).