Blue screen crash. Help?

Software & Apps
#1

Blue screen crash. Help?

I need a pro´s help. I recently had a crash in Windows that´s left me baffled. I was watching a video on my laptop, when I suddenly heard a wierd noise. I ignored it at first, but it kept creepìng up on me. Eventually, the noise lead to a crash, and the blue screen came up. Here´s what it said (in brief)

Kernal_Data_Inpage_Error

***STOP: oX0000007A (and 4 more successive blocks of numbers (just like this one) but containing a combination of 10 different characters & numbers)

then it wrote

atapi.sys

It started to dump physical memory
physical memory dump complete

Through the process, a tapping noise could be heard coming from inside the latop (almost sounded like a clicking clock)

I recently installed a video code called Vp7 from On2 technologies, is that the culprit? I needed to watch a video. That´s the only reason I installed it. Other than that, no other installations recently except of course, windows updates.

Another strange occurance, three seemingly harmless programs have added themsevlves to startup. Without my doing. They are

mHotkey.exe
Soundman.exe
and scardsvr.exe ( i dont recognize this one)

Also, after a few crashes, I decided to enter BIOS (everything looked ok there), and then at one particular boot, the operating system failed to load. I swear I didn´t change any BIOS settings. In fact, on boot, it says BIOS is shadowed now.

What do I do? I can´t load Windows? I can´t even load safe mode. I can only enter Bios, that´s about it, and it looks normal in BIOS.

Help

I run Windows Home edition

#2

Yo-

Try and reset the bios to the ‘default’ setting - then reboot-eh!

#3

:eek: Just a guess but a clicking sound could mean hard drive failure.

If you get back in I would back-up important data ASAP.


#4

Do you have the full code it displayed?
Go into the bios and turn OFF shadowing then try to boot up again.

Those programs on start up are:
mhotkey.exe= keyboard software
scardsvr.exe = smartcard server
soundman.exe is for your audio

#5

i can get the full code in the next post, but i dont even know what BIOS shadowing is. There is no option for it my BIOS. And my BIOS is and has always been at the default setting. That{s never changed.

#6

it has changed because now its shadowing. Go into the bios and hit the set defaults option.When you used windows update did it tell you any “controllers” needed to be updated? it would have been under the hardware updates. The eror your getting is usually associated with id e controllers and you shouldn’t update any hardware drivers through windows update it always causes trouble.

#7

ok the wierdest thing. im back in. the system booted normally. originally i said i was locked out, but after turning my computer off for 24h, i rebooted and it took me straight to windows (though at the beginning, it still said bios is being shadowed). that hasn’t changed. anyways, everything is back to normal (so far…)

i ran avg free scanner, and found 4 problem (none considered threats by the software). avg recommmend changing the following 4 system32 files. I dont know what it means by change, but here they are

kernel32.dll
user32.dll
shell32.dll
ntoskrnl.dll

I ran 3 other cleaners ans scanners. Adaware found malware and data miners - they didnt look suspicious or dangerous but i got rid of em. i believe the name of the malware was “lop”.

spybot (new version) found 87 cookie related problems after a bot check and fixed them all. I ran spypot (but the older version) only 10 days ago. It found nothing. I recently updated spybot.

one scary thing: i copied and pasted some mp3z, and the file transfer time seemed to have slowed to a crawl. It took more than 10 minutes to move 40 songs. That is new, and different.

My files are intact, nothing seems wrong, it’s as if everything is back to normal, but HDD is definatley slower.

By the way, I am backing up my audio files, and would like to know which CD-RW is best? I burned data on some CD-RWs back when I was in ASia, and after 4 months, the cds were trash - i lost the backups. I dont want that to happen again, so Im prepared to buy the bext in CD-RW data backup technoclogy. What do you recommend?

#8

AVG doesn’t mean they need changing it’s telling you a change has been made to those files, which is normal if you used windows update

#9

i recently updated a hell of a lot of windows updates. I used Windows Update (firefox) version. I think it download 50MB worth of updates, and installed them as a bundle. That was a few days ago. I can’;t believe Windows Updates caused my system to crash. I hope this doesnt happen again. How can I know?

#10

Pay attention to what you’re downloading, and never-never accept hardware or software updates from WindowsUpdate. OS updates only.