WayneLigon
Adventurer
I boot up the machine Monday afternoon, do email and play my Space Empires turn. Then I fire up World of Warcraft. The screen turns a non-Blue-Screen-Of-Death shade of blue and everything shuts down.
I try to reboot the machine but it keeps failing to do so. Finally, a couple of times, I get the machine up on it's feet. It manages to stay up long enough at one point to run a full scan with latest-updated Norton, which finds no viruses. I run Symantec's tool to kill and rebuild damage from the Sasser virus, though I'm not getting the errors and windows associated with the rebooting that it causes. Nothing. The machine keeps stopping on me, and a couple times I get the blue screen error PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA - it does not mention a specific driver that I can see but we're getting out of my league at this point.
Eventually the machine just stops bothering to reboot at all. It just continually sits there and reboots itself over and over again just as it tries to read the disk. I pull the covers off and check the SATA cable coming from the motherboard to the hardrive (first time I've ever had an ATA drive). It seems connected OK there and at the motherboard. I'm thinking at this point it's a HD problem.
I stick in the Windows XP CD and boot from it to Recovery Console. I run the little DOS-like utilities there. I do FIXBOOT and FIXMBR (Master Boot Record). Those have worked on PC's at work struck by a boot-sector virus.
No luck.
I go back and run CHKDSK, which does find errors on the disk. I run CHKDSK /P which says it looks at bad sectors and tries to recover readable information from them. I come back after that's finished and do CHKDSK again; it reports the disk is now clean. So after some four hours or more of the disk being constantly used while this sucker checks things, I'm no longer thinking it might be a disk surface or cable problem - does that sound reasonable?
So after all this, the machine still will not boot. I say 'screw it' and start to reinstall XP. I try the 'repair this installation' route. Nope. Then I start a complete re-install. It does all the preliminary stuff, the reboots and brings up the rest of the setup thing, where it tells me it will be some 39 minutes before it's done. About, oh, five minutes into this process I get a blue screen with, yes, PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA.
I'm looking on the net and most of the stuff involved with this error is total gobbledegook to me. Only if it were written in a language I don't read could it be more incomprehensable but some things I manage to find.
It seems as if this might be a problem with either the physical memory on the memory chips or on the video card. Is that reasonable to say? Has anyone had this problem before?
I try to reboot the machine but it keeps failing to do so. Finally, a couple of times, I get the machine up on it's feet. It manages to stay up long enough at one point to run a full scan with latest-updated Norton, which finds no viruses. I run Symantec's tool to kill and rebuild damage from the Sasser virus, though I'm not getting the errors and windows associated with the rebooting that it causes. Nothing. The machine keeps stopping on me, and a couple times I get the blue screen error PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA - it does not mention a specific driver that I can see but we're getting out of my league at this point.
Eventually the machine just stops bothering to reboot at all. It just continually sits there and reboots itself over and over again just as it tries to read the disk. I pull the covers off and check the SATA cable coming from the motherboard to the hardrive (first time I've ever had an ATA drive). It seems connected OK there and at the motherboard. I'm thinking at this point it's a HD problem.
I stick in the Windows XP CD and boot from it to Recovery Console. I run the little DOS-like utilities there. I do FIXBOOT and FIXMBR (Master Boot Record). Those have worked on PC's at work struck by a boot-sector virus.
No luck.
I go back and run CHKDSK, which does find errors on the disk. I run CHKDSK /P which says it looks at bad sectors and tries to recover readable information from them. I come back after that's finished and do CHKDSK again; it reports the disk is now clean. So after some four hours or more of the disk being constantly used while this sucker checks things, I'm no longer thinking it might be a disk surface or cable problem - does that sound reasonable?
So after all this, the machine still will not boot. I say 'screw it' and start to reinstall XP. I try the 'repair this installation' route. Nope. Then I start a complete re-install. It does all the preliminary stuff, the reboots and brings up the rest of the setup thing, where it tells me it will be some 39 minutes before it's done. About, oh, five minutes into this process I get a blue screen with, yes, PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA.
I'm looking on the net and most of the stuff involved with this error is total gobbledegook to me. Only if it were written in a language I don't read could it be more incomprehensable but some things I manage to find.
It seems as if this might be a problem with either the physical memory on the memory chips or on the video card. Is that reasonable to say? Has anyone had this problem before?
