A8Js Blue screen, help?

So, I got my a8js about 3 years ago, just recently the system locked up and froze while i was using it, I went to restart it, and it was stuck in a constant boot. It would begin to load windows with the little bar beneath it, then it will suddenly flash a blue screen, then start at the asus logo again.

I fixed it last time by doing a complete format, and now it has done it again. Can anyone give me an idea as to what exactly is going on? Any method to actually get windows to start properly without formatting it again?

Any help would be appreciated.

 

Without knowing the error codes from your blue screen, it's difficult to pin point what's causing these crashes. It might help if you can take a snapshot of your blue screen.

 

It literally flashes for like half a second, i dont even have a chance to read it unfortunately.

 

Press F8 during first seconds of Windows boot, try starting in "Last Known Good Config", and "Safe Mode".

 

thats the thing too, every time it restarts it always asks for those, ive tried litereally all of em, networking, safe mode, last good config, and it still gets stuck in a constant boot.

 

anyone? no idea what i could do or what the problem is?

 

Try an take a photo of the blue screen as I suggested earlier. I know it's hard and will probably take a few tries, but it's definitely do-able. Without that information it's impossible tell what the issue is.

However, if you don't want to go through all that trouble, your best bet is to perform a clean install of your OS. That may even also be the solution even if you found out what the cause is.

 

Ok, so i got a look at the screen quick, and the error is unaccountable boot volume, anything i can do with this?

 

That error means that it is having trouble mounting the hard drive during the second part of the boot process. You'll probably need to reload windows, as the windows system files are probably corrupted. If you have a full copy of XP, you can try the recovery process after booting from the CD. If that doesn't work, you'll need to reload windows from scratch and then reload your programs.

If you can make a Linux boot disk on another computer, you can copy your data to a USB pen drive. Ubuntu has NTFS support built in, and has a "Try Ubuntu without making changes to the computer", so you can boot to it and get your data off.

So, as a laundry list, here's what I'd do:

1. If you need to make a backup, do that first. Create a Ubuntu Linux boot disk on another computer, buy a USB drive if you don't already have one, and get any essential data backed up.

2. If you have an XP disk, boot to it and select "Recovery", then let it try to fix the system. This may work. If it doesn't work...

3. Either use the recovery disk that came with the computer, or reload XP and all the drivers.

If it won't reload from scratch, or flakes out a second time, your hard drive is probably flaky.


My two cents...

 

It sounds like you have a bad sector somewhere on your HD (as this is what I got on my A8Jm, variation of yours). I would first get any OS running, then check for bad blocks.

From there id remove that segment from your partition. That seems to have fixed my dilema.

 

would a complete format remove said block? as this is what i did

 

If you did a slow format instead of a quick format, it should have flagged the block as bad. You should still do a scandisk with the surface check option to make sure.

 

how would you go about that?

 

After Windows is installed, go to My Computer, right click on the icon for C:, click properties. One of the tabs at the top of the window should be "Tools". Select tools, then click the button that says "Check now". That will bring up scandisk. Once you are in scandisk, there should be a checkbox that says "Check disk surface for errors", or something like that. Check the checkbox, then continue. There is also an option that says "Fix errors automatically". If you don't want to babysit the whole check, you can select that as well.

Directions are approximate, because I'm not in front of an XP machine at the moment. But they should get you close enough to figure it out.