Quake3World

Windows sucks ass. This is the THIRD time the thing crashes then gives me the black screen on startup with the options to boot in safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, safe mode with networking, last known good configuration, and to boot normally.

All options result in the breifest flash of a blue screen and a restart of the computer. I mean, seriously, wtf. Im so sick of windows.

And to make matters worse, my knoppix cd just snapped in half while I was walking up a hill with it in my pocket. And I didn't save the image file on my hard drive. So now Im redownloading it to retrieve all my damn map and mod files as well as my other programs then I''m probably going to have to do a whole damn reinstall of Windows XP. The only reason I keep using Windows is World of Warcraft and Adobe Photoshop. Otherwise I'd ditch it for some form of linux.

ANYWAYS... if you know a better solution than a complete reinstall of windows please tell. I'd rather really not have to deal with the installation process again :icon27:

i think it might have something to do with this shitty nvidia video card. It's been known to crash my computer while playing games before and the computer only started getting screwed up when I had the card in. I still blame windows for not being able to deal with the video card.

/rant end

Stop playing World of Warcrap and use some other photo program.

photoshop's my life though . And no, I don't want to use Gimp.
And World of Warcraft is a good game. A lot of people just like to jump at a chance to tear it apart. What game in the same genre would you recommend then? Guild Wars?

Anyways, in the middle of swapping the system registry hives to see if that'll get my damn computer running again. *crosses fingers*

might need to blame your motherboard or powersupply?

what are your system specs ..is the motherboard real old ?

well, as I kind of suspected before, the registry hives did nothing but waste time.
I think you might have hit the nail on the head when you say its the motherboard.
Well... lets see.. system specs..

Processor: AMD Athlon XP 2400+
Video Card: ASUS GeForce FX 5200
Sound Card: Audigy Sound Blaster 2
RAM: Not positive. I think it was 360 MB? Originally 128 MB DDR
Hard Drive: Maxtor 2F040L0
CD-Drive: SAMSUNG CD-R/RW SW-2
Motherboard: Don't know.

I'm thinking if it is the motherboard I can try using the motherboard this linux computer is running off of to see if it'll boot...

I should at least back up the important files before trying anything screwy.

And yes, I feel like a complete dumbass not being able to tell what kind of motherboard I have. Doesn't say on the board =(

I officially fail in computer troubleshooting.
somehow, I dont know how I did it, but I managed to mess up my linux computer as well o.O
It suddenly wants to boot from the floppy drive for some reason. So, naturally I remove the floppy drive. Still wants to boot. So I try to go into the BIOS and see if the boot order changed. Computer restarts.
:icon23:

I think I need to stop messing with my computers for tonight and try again tomorrow. Because linux is screwed up now, I can't get to the damned Knoppix file to boot windows from. :icon13:

This could well be a Windows thing, but what you describe is a BSOD. That's blue screen of death if you didn't know.

Many things can cause this from your motherboard, power supply, Ram, and a f*&ked install of Windows.

If you don't know what you're doing, get a friend to look at or take it to a shop.

If you don't know anyone, first thing I would try is a Re-install. Back things up and nuke it.

During the re-install, pay attention to any error messages. If you get things like......problems reading files etc. you have bad RAM. Another indication of bad Ram is the BSOD about 70% of the way through installing devices [during setup].

Motherboard and power supply issues USUALLY involve random rebooting of Windows or a very slow response time to everything including startup.

Never put your data on the same partition as your OS. Make a separate partition for data (your maps, mods, documents, images etc.) so that when you need to format, only the OS partition has to be formatted.

Damn, Oeloe. That's some good advice. I'll definately keep that in mind.

Zolborg: I know what a BSOD is. That's what Im getting actually. Except instead of staying up on the screen it only flashes for about 1/8th of a second and my computer then restarts.
I know its not faulty RAM.
So then it must be either the motherboard or power supply. If I play a game with any other video card the computer runs fine.
However, if I plug in the ASUS videocard I get random reboots and even a black screen with my speakers looping a small piece of sound over and over again such as a gunshot in Q3 or Call of Duty.


I'm not to worried about the computer itself. Just the map and mod files I've been working on mainly.
So, I'm going to try to fix this problem myself otherwise I wouldn't learn a damn thing.

Thanks a ton for all the help everybody. I really appreciate it. I've decided to just do a reinstall

There should be a setting in your BIOS telling your pc what to do on an error as in, halt, reboot, etc... Try setting that to halt and maybe you can read the exact BSOD error.

I actually thought I did set it to halt. Ill double check to make sure though =)

ok got the blue screen to stay open.

STOP: c0000221 Unknown Hard Error
\systemroot\system32\ntdll.dll

Well good. Now I know what's going on. Time to replace ntdll =P

Yep. Looks like something has corrupted or replaced one or more of your windows system driver files.

ahahahahahahahahaha
I win.

After 30 minutes of Access Denied when trying to copy ntdll.dll from my flash drive to the hard drive I decided to take a peek in the recovery disk I was booted off of. Sure enough its in the i386 folder. Doh.
I had access to that one.

Just copied it and now my computer is back to normal. As an added bonus I have a clean desktop :icon32:

Thank you so much for all the help everybody!! Couldn't have done it without you.

And I learned something too. So now I can fix this problem if it ever occurs again. And I'm pretty damn sure it will.

Oeloe wrote:Never put your data on the same partition as your OS. Make a separate partition for data (your maps, mods, documents, images etc.) so that when you need to format, only the OS partition has to be formatted.

This isn't really necessary, but then I don't know anything about World of Warcraft.

But, with Quake you can simply make a backup of your Q3config and if you need a re-install you can just paste your backup of the Q3config into the new install and you're good to go. I would assume that WOW has something similar.

scourge34 wrote:There should be a setting in your BIOS telling your pc what to do on an error as in, halt, reboot, etc... Try setting that to halt and maybe you can read the exact BSOD error.

The BIOS has nothing to do with the handling of crashes in windows. There's a windows setting to prevent your system from rebooting automatically in case of a crash though:

System Properties (windows key+pause) > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Settings > System Failure >"automatically restart".

Don't know why I thought it was in the bios. But, yeah, that's what I was thinking of.

edit: I was confusing that with my last MB BIOS that had an option for halting on boot errors.

did you add ram to your computer recently?

me? Nope.

Fixed the computer btw. Im using it to type this right now =)

right on!

glad it wasn't a hardware problem ..for some reason i thought perhaps your powersupply wasn't putting out at least 300watts ..the minimum i think a newer graphics card requires thus the new video card problem.

that ntddll problem happens to me a lot when i try to overclock my system and the system locks up .. i reset the system back to it's default speed and windows usually fixes Itself.
cheers

Silicone_Milk wrote:me? Nope.

Fixed the computer btw. Im using it to type this right now =)

Good deal. :icon14:

axbaby wrote:right on!

glad it wasn't a hardware problem ..for some reason i thought perhaps your powersupply wasn't putting out at least 300watts ..the minimum i think a newer graphics card requires thus the new video card problem.

that ntddll problem happens to me a lot when i try to overclock my system and the system locks up .. i reset the system back to it's default speed and windows usually fixes Itself.
cheers

heh, good ole ax.. tryin to keep up with the o/c's

thanks :icon25:

the ntdll problem has happened to me before apparently since my videocard has done this a couple times before. And I've had to reinstall this OS a couple times