Quake3World

My brother has a Dell Demension E520. Getting the BSOD. Tried booting off of the XP CD and it gets to the point of saying "starting windows" and then the BSOD shows up.

I tried a different hard drive and it does the same thing. I tried different RAM and it does the same thing.

I'm guessing it is the motherboard, but wanted to know if there were any other ideas out there.

From what you described it could be anything.

BSODs usually point to what caused them. Take a look at this screenie and note the codes at the bottom half of the screen (0xFD3904C2, 0x00000001, etc).

[lvlshot]http://hazil.pxq.in/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/bsod1.jpg[/lvlshot]

Write down the various codes that show up in your BSOD and search microsoft.com to find out what's going on (or perhaps some of the colossal nerds here recognize them). Alot of times it's a device driver that's causing the problem and not necessarily a hardware issue.

As well as the codes, in this particular screenshot "spcmdcon.sys" is of particular interest. Chuck that motherfucker into google and there are sure to be many hits. If it disappears too quickly to note down anything, try taking a well timed digicam/phone picture and deciphering that.

are you able to disable sata ahci in the bios?

It certainly would not be a device driver causing the problem if it crashes booting off of the cd

Well... I had the exact same problem and it would BSOD at the exact same spot with the exact same STOP: codes :/ Your dell model lists the controller as ICH8R which you'll need to load before the windows setup starts or slipstream it into an xp install (I had to do it with ICH9M/M) or disable what I mentioned in the BIOS.

Im 99.9% sure this is the problem youre having, if it really isn't then sorry I guess

i agree with bacon.

quaker13 wrote:It certainly would not be a device driver causing the problem if it crashes booting off of the cd

It can be, if it's due to the incorrect storage drivers loading in by default. May need to preload some drivers with the F6 menu.

Bacon likely has this one right.

I forgot to post a link to the drivers, my bad

click here if you want to try them (this has from ich6-ich10 included in it i think)