Classic British Flight Sim

Hi all,

hope someone can help me out here. Currently using PS3 to access web so apologies if this is brief but it takes a lifetime to type !

Something has made my laptop poorly and now it boots up to desktop icons and as soon as they appear, I get the blue screen of death followed by a reboot. Then the BSOD again. This continues in a nasty infinite loop.

Its worked fine this morning and I haven't downloaded or been on any dodgy sites!

Just tried system restore using safe mode and its still crashing upon appearance of icons.

Could probably do with a fresh install and formatting anyway. Is this my only option? If so, how do I do it in safe mode?

Help guys!!

BSOD's are usually hardware... will it boot into safe mode mate? Is it Vista or XP?

Hi mate,

Sorry forgot to mention its XP Home edition. Seems to boot up fine in safe mode but only after several minutes!!

The BSOD should give sim indication of what has caused it while it does the crash dump. Sounds like bad memory if it happens after a few minutes (or it could be a bad sector on the disk where the pagefile is) If you have 2 memory dims in it try taking each of them out in turn and firing it up. Remember it will be slower with half the memory, and this assumes you have to memory dimms otherwise there isn't much you can do. Can you let me know the make / model of the laptop? I have some old memory dimms you could use to check it, if they our supported on your laptop.

Hi again mate.

Just tried removing each memory Dimm in turn and tried that.

Alas, it still does it with either one inserted.

Damn it!

What make / model of laptop is it? Do you have the original CD's?

Just the very same thing happened to a friend 2 weeks ago...was a Dell laptop....she sent it back and it was the HDD knackered...replaced and a new recovery disc sent...Win XP...

Tony

The machine is an ACER 9513 Wsmi. There was no Windows disc when I bought it. Its already built in, with the licence sticker underneath.

There is a built in recovery agent which doesn't seem to run in safe mode, hence I can't get to format.

Not convinced the HDD is knackered but could be wrong though.

Most Acer laptops have a hidden partition that contains the recovery disc image, there is a way to access it immediately when you turn the computer on. You might have to turn it on and go into the BIOS and enable the boot recovery option (sometimes called D2D recovery or similar).

If that doesn't work try holding down F8 when you reboot and you should get a menu with a repair option that you can choose. It'll eventually lead you to a command prompt and I think you can start the recovery from the X:\ drive.

I imagine you can then use mbrwrwin boot hdo:x to set the master boot record to boot from the X:\ drive instead and it'll start the recovery process as though you're using a recovery disc.

Please BE VERY CAREFUL with this. If you aren't sure I'd recommend just sending it to Acer as if you mess around with mbrwrwin you can get the PC stuck in an even worse infinite loop with no chance of recovery.

There is a valuable lesson here though, always make a copy of the hidden recovery partition onto a bootable DVD in future and it'll save you a lot of hassle.

Edit : A helpful link
http://www.acerpanam.com/synapse/forms/ ... =&areaid=7

Eddie I had this problem with my computer last week..Boot up...welcome screen...then boot-up...welcome screen etc. :brick:

This occurred 4-5 times before finally going into full window mode I ran check disk, it found some bad sectors then after it completed the tests all was well again.

Not saying that you may have the same problem but it may well be worth trying this option first.

Also try this link, download the diagnostic tool for your hard drive (make sure that you download the correct one) then burn the download to a cd/dvd, once done re-boot the computer ensuring that it reads from cd instead of hard drive and it will diagnose your hard drive for any problems.

http://www.tacktech.com/display.cfm?ttid=287

Regards
Nigel