AOA150 - Boots to Bios - No warning

Hi

I have an AOA150 with XP home 1G and the 160G drive. It is 1yr and 4 months old.

From time to time it will boot to bios and hang at that point. No exact action can cause this in regular use. This started about 2 months back.

First it would hang on bios "net boot" then I removed net boot from the option list and then it just re-booted to the bios main page (This was ver 3309)

Other observations - Defrag would generate issue without fail... Typically within a min.

Check disk (Protected mode from reboot) would get to step 4 of 5 and hang at 21%

I updated to BIOS 310 tonight and defrag did a reboot to BIOS again.

There is BSOD reported just before bios but too fast to read.

I am expecting that the drive is toast in a certain sector? XP file maybe?... Is it worth a re-install of XP ?

Thanx for any help

 

Try and boot the machine while tapping F8.

Been a while since I've used XP so bear with me here, there's an option in the menu similar to "Disable automatic reboot on system failure". Booting with this option will tell windows to throw up the BSOD and stay there untill you manually shut down. Get the BSOD code from here (usually something like 0x00000000) and either post that code here, or google it for more information.

Otherwise at a glance I'd say your hard drive is close to imminent failure.

 

Codes are

*** Stop: 0x000000F4 (0x00000003, 0x86673410, 0x86673584, 0x8060577E)

Google does not return much on this error

 

I found this over lunch...

0x000000F4 (0x00000003, Parameter2, Parameter3, Parameter4)

Note Parameter2, Parameter3, and Parameter4 in the stop error may vary.

This problem occurs on a computer in which Windows XP or a later operating system is installed on a hard disk that is configured as a subordinate and no other device is connected to the same IDE controller channel (primary or secondary).

Entire text here...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/330100

There is a good deal on a AO751H right now @ $279 CDN I think I will pick that up.

The kids can use the old AOA 150 until the drive dies and then I will make it an SD machine I guess.. There must be a HDD to SD based how too on here somewhere.. I guess I just need to find it...

 

Try running Memtest86 on you RAM too. Faulty / dying RAM can cause read/write errors, as well as the CPU will end up miscalculating causing a wide variety of other errors. RAM is also cheap to replace.