[Waffleboy]

So basically I was fixing a laptop for a teacher at my school. It had windows Vista and was Blue screening with the error Config_List_Failed in all kinds of booting (regular, safe mode, command line, recovery, etc.) so I grabbed UBCD4Win and booted from the CD. I ran a SuperAntiSpyware scan and some hard drive health utilities, and meanwhile looked up the BSOD on google. I found that there were three main causes: hard drive failure, Registry failure, or malware. My hard drive and virus scans turned up blank, so I tried Defragging just to see what would happen. Only about 1.5 percent of the disk was fragmented, so I fixed it and restarted the computer to copy down all the info from the BSOD so I could look up more details about the problem. To my surprise, the computer booted fine and continued to boot fine in all my tests. The only tool I used that made any changes was Auslogics Disk Defrag which, as I said, only found a small amount of fragmented files. I'm just curious as to why this would fix the BSOD. Could it just have been an unluckily fragmented file or part of the registry that was screwing up the boot?

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"Stop errors can be caused by just about anything, including poor quality audio drivers, incompatible video drivers, bad or corrupt hard disks, and faulty hardware such as bad RAM, dying motherboards, failing power supplies, etc. Stop errors may be triggered by an event such as plugging in a USB device, or they may appear to occur at regular intervals, or in association with some other event. Sometimes a stop error might appear to be completely random. If a stop error identifies a driver, the fault may not lie with the driver that was reported. Worse still, some errors can mask other critical errors, which means you fix one stop error and get another in return. In short, a stop error may be a symptom of some other problem. The real problem is to find the root cause."

You may have just got lucky! What was the Stop error code?

Here's a few interesting links on Blue screens,

http://www.help2go.c...ath_(BSoD).html

http://www.nirsoft.n...creen_view.html

Edited by zep516, 09 October 2010 - 03:07 PM.

[zep516]

"Stop errors can be caused by just about anything, including poor quality audio drivers, incompatible video drivers, bad or corrupt hard disks, and faulty hardware such as bad RAM, dying motherboards, failing power supplies, etc. Stop errors may be triggered by an event such as plugging in a USB device, or they may appear to occur at regular intervals, or in association with some other event. Sometimes a stop error might appear to be completely random. If a stop error identifies a driver, the fault may not lie with the driver that was reported. Worse still, some errors can mask other critical errors, which means you fix one stop error and get another in return. In short, a stop error may be a symptom of some other problem. The real problem is to find the root cause."

You may have just got lucky! What was the Stop error code?

Here's a few interesting links on Blue screens,

http://www.help2go.c...ath_(BSoD).html

http://www.nirsoft.n...creen_view.html

Edited by zep516, 09 October 2010 - 03:07 PM.