[bigsmoke]

hey guys. i've been having troubles with my computer of lately, i cannot boot into 3 out of 4 of my hard drives, i have three physical hard drives

1 160GB maxtor IDE
1 80GB Western Digital SATA
1 500GB Maxtor SATA

i have the maxtor SATA partitioned into two seperate drives for a dual boot, one with XP pro and one with Vista Ultimate (which i am using now)

i have XP pro on my other two hard drives, and both of those as well as my first partition on this drive give me a BSoD on boot and the restarts the computer.

i've tried the recovery console, but it asks me for the administrator password. i KNOW for a fact and am 100% sure i did not put a password on the administrator account. so what does that mean? it means that i am suppose to leave it blank, and just press enter

but of course windows has to be stubborn, and it tells me that it is an invalid password. So i try my normal user account password. and get the same thing.

so my question here is, am i SOL? or is there a way i can find out my admin password on the drives that cannot boot up?

THANK YOU for the help i really need it.

Edited by bigsmoke, 11 December 2007 - 07:46 PM.

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i forgot to mention, the blue screens just flicker and then go away, it does not give me enough time to even catch a glimpse of the stop code.

i was told to enter the boot menu and turn off the restart thing, but there is no option for that in there.

[bigsmoke]

i forgot to mention, the blue screens just flicker and then go away, it does not give me enough time to even catch a glimpse of the stop code.

i was told to enter the boot menu and turn off the restart thing, but there is no option for that in there.

[happyrock]

first...why do you have 3 different xp installs on the same computer...????
can you boot into safe mode on the xp install...
did your setup ever work...
get a copy of your boot.ini file and paste it in your next post...
you might want to take a look here...
How to dual-boot Vista with XP - step-by-step guide with screenshots

[bigsmoke]

i have 3 XPs because this problem didnt happen all at once, it happened to one, and i had stuff i couldnt lose from a reformat. then i installed another one and eventually the same thing happened, and now i installed this 3rd one and it was good for awhile and now it happens again.

yes my setups did work, all 3 of them at one point. now i am down to vista

safe mode does not work either, but instead of a bluescreen flashing, it just restarts the computer.

on another note, it seems i have no boot.ini file??

i have all my files set to show, even hidden system files.

i can't find the one for Vista either in the root drive?

i have a bootcfg.exe i could post if that would help, as well as a minidump file

Edited by bigsmoke, 11 December 2007 - 02:44 PM.

[bigsmoke]

ok i found the STOP code it keeps giving me. this is exactly what it says

STOP code: 0x00000BE (0xE0BA6000, 0x00BA6121, 0xF63A34FC, 0x0000000B)

vidstub.sys - Address F5ACB189 base at F5ACA000, Datestamp 408D4B3D


so its a driver error, i'm guessing that the vidstub file is whats causing my problem?


edit: i did re-install my sound card drivers, that is most likely my problem because it started givng me this problem afterwards, is there anyway i can remove the drivers off the non-bootable OS?

Edited by bigsmoke, 11 December 2007 - 07:49 PM.

[Ztruker]

I did a Google search for vidstub.sys and came up with this: http://www.file.net/...idstub.sys.html. Does it apply?

Also here: http://forums.stardo...u...d=91272&c=1

[bigsmoke]

thanks i will try that, i didn't install any bootscreens, still using the default XP one.

i tried it, i have no vidstub.sys file in my system32/drivers directory. i will try deleting my sound card drivers


another edit: i dont know which drivers are for my sound card, and i still have no vidstub.sys file in my drivers directory.

thanks for the help!

Edited by bigsmoke, 11 December 2007 - 08:43 PM.

[Ztruker]

If it's not in the driver directory then it may very well be some kind of malware. Search the entire hard drive for it, see if it's in some other location. If yes, then I would recommend you read through this area of the board: Malware Removal Guides and Tutorials

If still having problems, post here: Malware Removal - HijackThis™ Logs Go Here