"blue screen of death" help needed

[gunnar1073]

Mike, Do you have Norton? or more importantly Norton Go Back installed?

[mikelum]

@ Gunnar 1073
nope, i've COMMAND antivirus

[Detector]

I assumed you were doing a install/repair from the original CD that came with your PC. If so then there should not be any files needed by the install that are not on your CD.

If its a Dell you should be able to press F10 at the startup and run the Dell Diagnostics. It should tell you if you have a heat/memory/hardware problem.

[mikelum]

hi Detector
actually in 2002 when i purchased the computer from DELL, they did not ship the original Microsoft CD Win XP with hologram, but shipped instead the operating system CD i am using here. It is labeled as follow:
Operating System
Reinstallation CD
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
DELL
for distribution only with a dell computer
--------------------

Thank you for telling me the F10 test initialisation, which i am doing right now and will post the results.

[Detector]

I reinstall the operating system on these Dells on a regular basis and none of them came with the hologram CD. They are all just plain old green probably just like yours. I have never had them ask for any files not on that CD or the blue resource/driver CD.

[Zeb]

Just a few comments


It might be the F12 button on most dell's to get to the diagnostics to test your drives and such. Just look when it boots, it will say.

Also from the Recovery Console you can do the CHKDSK /R to repair the drive structure. Also you can do the following commands from the prompt FIXMBR and FIXBOOT. Not much else you can do with the recovery console.

[mikelum]

@ Detector, a simple google search "asms file" comes out with pages and pages of people who encountered that very same problem when attempting to reinstall Win XP. As i said previously, Microsft itself proposes a 3 method fix
"The file 'Asms' on Windows XP Professional CD-ROM is needed" error message when you install Windows XP

@ Zeb, thank you for suggesting it, but i suppose this is F10, which i ran yesterday evening and resulted in zero errors. I found the Recovery Console not to be end-user freindly, but tried of course CHKDSK and FIXBOOT, i can still try FIXMBR as you suggested but i am pessimistic.

Overall i begin to have a suspiscion, and may be Detector or someone else would have a specialist opinion about it. May be 2 years ago a virus scan came up positive, and there was no fix ready, so i hired a person to come up and fix it. I was not impressed by the guy's competence, to say the least. As i was not with him all the time, I can't rule out that he has reinstalled Win XP on my computer from one of his own CDs. Now my question is: is it possible that my attempts to "repair" Win XP encounters a conflict between the possibly Reinstalled version from the guy's CD, and my Win XP CD disk?


I tried most of what i can do myself. Being an amateur without experience, i am hesitant to do enter to deep in rigistry etc I am about ready to give up, that stupid "asms" begins to really go on my nerves.

[Zeb]

There are ways around this problem maybe.... When installing the OS you can try changing the windows directory. Instead of the default c:\windows change the directory to c:\winnt. If you do this you will probably end up with a wipe of everything and it is not an over the top installation. I assume you are past the point of saving your old stuff?

I want to say that you will then have a dual boot system, showing two winxp OS's on the boot menu. There is a way to do this then get rid of the old bad install in c:\windows.

This may be a little more than you bargined for, but there will be no conflics with the old xp OS install.

Someone correct me if I am wrong I may be getting win2000 and XP confused.

[SGT T.]

In my professional opinion...

It MIGHT work. Then again...

It MIGHT NOT.

Man, you are in a tight spot. I don't envy you, but I will say this, Computer are just machines, and all machines break occasionaly. Thats what keeps people like me in buissness. While you are redoing the entire thing, I would like to insert this SHAMELESS PLUG FOR WINDOWS VISTA:

More stable. Easier to troubleshoot. Easier to back up. USER FRIENDLY.

There, thats the end of the plug. Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

[mikelum]

oh well, SGT T. you're right of course, they're only machines, and this one being 5 years old, will be put in a corner for some moments of leisure at a later date, if ever.

i'm going for a new laptop, and plug or not plug, it will run Vista.

thank you everyone for your helpful input.