Help required with blue screen of death after windows update on dell dim 2400

[Friar]

Guys, i need your help!

my chairman brought me in his home pc to sort out a problem with his subsciption to norton. it had expired and he had bought a new one but could not apply it, but that is bye the bye. i am now at the stage where the old addage of "being up to your arse in aligators, when all you wanted to do was drain the swamp". is in force

Here is the problem....

After installing he new version of norton, windows update kicked in. it downloaded some 62 updates.

now when the machine re-boots i get the "blue screen of death" that states "a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to precent damage to your computer. if this is the first time you have seen this error screen,restart your computer and follow these steps.

run a system diagnostic utillty provided by your hardware supplier and check for memory" etc

The stop number was 0x0000007F

The pc is a dell dimension 2400 running xp home sp1

there is no re-store point saved.

he has had this problem before after doing a windows upgrade but i was then able to use a restore point to cancel out the upgrade. I only remembered this when confronted by the blue screen shit! (so the re-store point seems to have been lost/deleted)

i have run the dell dianostics that can be found via the f12 boot menu all tests have passed.

i can boot up into safe mode ok.

the dell is standard and has not had any new/third party hardware added.

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Can i remove the updates via control panel add/remove?

What should i do next chaps? re-install o/s (if i can get a disk)?

beers all round if you can help !

[BBloke]

Colin,

If you can boot into safe mode then that is a start. You obviously have internet access which is a massive plus.

[B16Enk]

Before removing Norton I would make a NTFS boot floppy.

Assuming you have a floppy drive of course!

Format a floppy in XP (must be done in XP ).

Copy the following files from the Dell:

ntdetect.com

ntldr

boot.ini

You may need to turn of hide protected/system files option.

Norton has a habit of buggering up boot files when being un-installed.

When you have it working again get SP2 on it too, and consider persuading the company to get a copy or two of Norton Ghost for the critical PC's (no good for servers).

[Friar]

hi guys, thanks for the support.

1. i have created the boot disk just in case

2. i can only boot in safe mode but norton wont uninstall in safe mode. i have downloaded the norton removal tool and that will not work in safe mode either. know any other ways?

i have the sp2 upgrade disk, is it worth applying that from safe mode to see it helps?

[BBloke]

I did find this on Symantec site:

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/en ... Open&src=w

I'm not sure if it will work or cover the sins that have happened....

Maybe you should try some holy water.

[Friar]

well that bottle of holy st olegs priory special reserve port certainly helped....

in safe mode i went in to add/remove programs and removed all the hotfix's and windows updates, and hey presto it booted back into normal windows mode.

plan of action now...

1. remove norton using the special remove program.

2. disk defrag

3. install sp2

4. check for any patches

5. re-install norton

any further comments ? / suggestions

edit: ran a dell crash analysis utility and it pointed towards the roxio cd and aol (turns head and spits) needing driver updates, which does tie in as i tried to write some files to cd that were waiting to be written but it kept saying that the drive did not have a cd in it.

[BBloke]

I'm glad its booting Colin.

Your plan of action sounds like a very good plan.

[Friar]

chris,

the pc does only have 256mb of memory.

am i right in thinking that sp2 needs more?

[BBloke]

I dont think there are any memory limitation imposed against a service pack.

Early PC's were shipped with 256mb of RAM as a minimum requirement for XP Pro or Home.

[Friar]

thanks chris,

sorry about last night, soon after sending the message, i decided to head off to bed, it had been a bad day! forgeting about the invite, but as you were busy, it seems no problem. hopefully speak to you tonight