S
Spivonious
I was given a Sony Vaio laptop that had Windows XP Pro SP1 on it. The
customer wanted it to be cleaned up and to fix the wireless connection, as it
was not connecting. It was connecting fine but then one day it connected to
the network fine but couldn't get on the Internet. Other wireless computers
in the household could get on the Internet.
Anyway, to the problem at hand. I uninstalled their expired copy of Norton
Internet Security 2006, rebooted, and then ran Windows Update. They had
never run it before (!) so it had quite a few updates to install. I let it
do its thing and rebooted as requested when it was finished. To my dismay
the computer automatically rebooted after the Windows logo but before going
to the Welcome screen. I attempted to boot into Safe Mode with Networking
but got the same result. I was able to get into plain Safe Mode and disable
the auto reboots so I could see what error it was. Turns out to be Stop Code
7F 0x0 which according to MS is a divide-by-zero error. MS suggests this is
most likely a hardware issue. Since the computer works perfectly fine in
Safe Mode and Safe Mode with Command Prompt, but crashes when booting every
other option, I'm pretty sure it's something related to the network hardware.
I've removed what network hardware I could from Device Manager (some of them
wouldn't let me, saying they were required for boot), scanned for
spyware/viruses using Ad-Aware and Avast (nothing found), ran chkdsk (found
and repaired some freespace index problems) and ran the Norton Removal Tool
just to make sure I got everything Norton out of there. The computer boots a
lot faster now, but still gets that same 7F BSOD. I've also run MS's memory
tester (no problems found in normal test). Nothing shows up in the event log
except some messages that some services can't be loaded in Safe Mode.
Does anyone have any ideas? I even tried a System Restore but that failed
too. I can't get into the recovery console because the Administrator
password apparently isn't blank. That's another weird thing: I can log in to
the Administrator account in Safe Mode just fine, but Recovery Console
doesn't like my blank password field.
customer wanted it to be cleaned up and to fix the wireless connection, as it
was not connecting. It was connecting fine but then one day it connected to
the network fine but couldn't get on the Internet. Other wireless computers
in the household could get on the Internet.
Anyway, to the problem at hand. I uninstalled their expired copy of Norton
Internet Security 2006, rebooted, and then ran Windows Update. They had
never run it before (!) so it had quite a few updates to install. I let it
do its thing and rebooted as requested when it was finished. To my dismay
the computer automatically rebooted after the Windows logo but before going
to the Welcome screen. I attempted to boot into Safe Mode with Networking
but got the same result. I was able to get into plain Safe Mode and disable
the auto reboots so I could see what error it was. Turns out to be Stop Code
7F 0x0 which according to MS is a divide-by-zero error. MS suggests this is
most likely a hardware issue. Since the computer works perfectly fine in
Safe Mode and Safe Mode with Command Prompt, but crashes when booting every
other option, I'm pretty sure it's something related to the network hardware.
I've removed what network hardware I could from Device Manager (some of them
wouldn't let me, saying they were required for boot), scanned for
spyware/viruses using Ad-Aware and Avast (nothing found), ran chkdsk (found
and repaired some freespace index problems) and ran the Norton Removal Tool
just to make sure I got everything Norton out of there. The computer boots a
lot faster now, but still gets that same 7F BSOD. I've also run MS's memory
tester (no problems found in normal test). Nothing shows up in the event log
except some messages that some services can't be loaded in Safe Mode.
Does anyone have any ideas? I even tried a System Restore but that failed
too. I can't get into the recovery console because the Administrator
password apparently isn't blank. That's another weird thing: I can log in to
the Administrator account in Safe Mode just fine, but Recovery Console
doesn't like my blank password field.