Stop messages on boot

[Brent Parsons]

Ok guys I am newb to this and need some help...About a week ago I got two error messages on my computer, which I forgot to write down. Soon after that my XP machine starts to restart itself randomly. I restarted manually and get an error message from Isass.exe. The message says something about the password value is incorrect. If I do nothing at the message it restarts continually. I got a copy of XP professional and tried to install that over my original copy, all the while coming to different stop messages such as: Bad_Pool_Caller, IRQL_NOT_Lessthan_ or_equal, and my personal favorite Pagefault_in_nonpaged_area. Those along with 3-4 other random stop screens kept poping up. I FINALLY get lucky and the install goes through...now I can access windows. I am thinking that I have corrected my problem but I am still getting random restarts. This seems like a grouping of about 4 different problems I've seen here. I am probably going to try to erase and completely redo the whole disk but Im unsure how...someone told me that XP erases it when it formats it but like I said earlier I am a newb to this. Any info would be greatly appreciated.

[Ron Kinner]

http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q316134

Talks about your original error. Before you do a complete reinstall you might want to go to windowsupdate.microsoft.com and let them give you the latest updates. You might get lucky.

Ron

[Brent Parsons]

Thanks Ron but I already took a look at that..and like I said Im a newb..not ready to go into the registry and start messing around(even though I do it at my job, on other people's computers) I read up somewhere that it might be a memory issue and low and behold I take my newly purchased mem chip out and I havent had any problems yet. Thanks for the reply

[James D. Booe]

did you forget to mention that you had put an extra memory card in?
When you put a question on here it is a good idea to list what has happened to and from the machine, not to be sarcastic, just like at work people sometimes forget to tell the fine details which sometimes makes it much easier to get to the bottom. One note: When any version of Windows fails on install the very first thing to check is memory!
Have fun.

[Brent Parsons]

Actually I did forget I put memory in...it was working fine for a good two months afterwards until this happened. I since last reply I've gotten those stop messages I'd say about 30 times, some while using, most on boot. I've switched out the other memory chip and put the original back in but that doesnt seem to help either. I did get new stop messages though: win32k.sys, ntfs.sys, and portcls.sys all being the cause. Could the problem be in my motherboard causing memory to go bad?

[Jon Finley]

Slot 0 sets the speed for the remaining memory slots. If you have placed memory that is faster than the rest of your memory in slot 0, you'll start having problems.

Better to either replace all, or use the oldest in slot 0.

We came across this on Dell Optiplex and PowerEdge systems.

NOTE: It's also possible that the newer memory just went bad ---- Got any testing software? :-(


Jon

[James D. Booe]

If you haven't already done so, I'd suggest unplugging the devices that are plugged into the backside of the machine, without the details to the stop msg I think you could have some other device or driver problem. If so, testing each device to see if you get the stop or other errors while using you will have to at the very least get updated drivers for that device.
Have Fun!