Can't Reformat

After what I assume is a bad reaction to anti-virus (because it only started after a critical error in bitdefender), my parents' computer started BSODing. It got more and more rapid until eventually it wouldn't even get into Windows. I managed to recover all necessary files by hooking the hard-drive up to my computer and fetching them. I then assumed that I could just do a fresh install of XP and all would be good.

However, when I boot from the Windows XP CD it BSOD's in both attempts to install and repair windows. The error message is Page_Fault_in_Non_Paged_Area. I've already memtested the RAM, and while one stick was bad, the rest seems good. I'm not really sure how memtest works, so maybe I should do a long test of each stick?

Anyways, is there any way to do an install of XP in another way? Or could it be something I haven't considered?

Thanks

 

Have you tryed getting into safe mode? Try running scandisk to see if you have some bad clusters. You could try another hard drive.

 

Safe modes a no go. Can't get into windows at all.

 

By any chance when you hooked the hard drive to your pc did you change the switch from master to slave. If so put it back to what ever it was before you hooked it to your pc.

 

Internet said I didn't need to change any jumpers with SATA hard drives, so I didn't, and that seemed to work.

 

just to be sure: did you take out the faulty RAM stick?

 

Yup. Had 2x 512 + 2x 256. The faulty one was a 256; I just took both of the 256s out, so am running at 1gb right now.

 

why dont you put the drive into your pc as an extra hard drive. Boot to windows and format the drive from windows explorer. Then place it in the other machine.

 

Fixed it now, by doing something similar.

I hooked it up to a different computer to get my stuff off. But then I didn't have access to another machine, so I just booted ubuntu off of a CD and reformatted from there. It's back up and working now.

Thanks for the help.