The dreaded blue screen of death
 

I need some help troubleshooting my PC.

I have been offline for almost seven months now and today I got some cable broadband. The first thing I did was download quite a few upgrades for windows. The d/l and install completed and I was told to reboot. On the restart everything went smooth until the desktop is supposed to pop up and blam.... blue screen. I killed the power and tried to boot up again and it made it all the way through to the scandisk and blam... blue screen. I tried booting up in safe mode to no avail. I tried reverting to the last known good setting and had no luck. I tried cancelling scandisk and that didnt work either.

About two weeks ago I purchased a 128Mb graphics card and I thought it may be taxing my 450Mhz P3 so I put the old graphics card in and that didnt help either.

Can anyone offer any suggestions? Im running Win 2000 Pro. My next option involves a hammer and a blow torch unless someone can help.

Can you tell us the error name ? and were you running a firewall when you went online ?

yes. give me a couple minutes

this is what it says across the top of the screen...

STOP: 0x0000001E (0x0000005, 0xEB4608D3, 0x00000000, 0x0000000C) KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

Address EB4608DB base at EB460000, Date Stamp 3a2561d2 - L842pr2.sys

No firewall, unless there is on the the cable modem. Everything worked fine until I tried to restart after d/ling windows updates.

Well lets see what google and the windows knowledge base says:

And explanation of your error:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=275678

Nothing on l842pr2.sys, must not be a windows system file.

it could be a trojan: http://support.microsoft.com/default...NoWebContent=1

Do you have a Scsi drive:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307128

My money is on that you got backdoor.NThack going online without a firewall. Hope this helps and you might want to try a windows re-install.

Edit: Can't believe I forgot this, GET A FIREWALL if you have a cable modem.

Zonealarm is free and does a great job.

There is a very good chance that something (namely a trojan or virus of some sort) installed itself on your system before you updated. Try booting into Safe Mode (press F8 at the boot splash screen) and see if it boots...

I tried booting in safe mode, but I still got the blue screen.

A trojan? I was only connected to the internet for a couple minutes before it started going to the blue screen.

This is from the microsoft support page describing the error.
4. If you have a video driver that was not supplied with the operating system, try switching to the standard VGA driver or a driver that is compatible with the operating system.

I looked on the microsoft hardware compatability list and my ATI Radeon 9200 was not there.

Mabey this is a problem with the driver I installed for the video card? I have been using the new video card for a couple weeks now with no problems. Wouldnt the blue screen have popped up when I started using the video card? How do I take the new driver out if I cant get windows to come up?

Thats enough time to get a trojan.

It seems funny that it started crashing immediatly after I installed the updates.

Thanks, I feel like its most probably the updates.

The video card worked for two weeks with no problem and it didnt fix after i put in the old one back in. The microsoft support page said it could be a trojan virus, but I was only online for 10 minutes and all I downloaded was the updates. And I was running norton antivirus.

I guess Ill try to get into safe mode or repair mode a couple more times...

If I cant get in then I'll have no choice but to reinstall or repair OS right?

I would disconnect all peripherals and unnecessary drives and try to boot in safe mode, backi up data, and re-install. The bug-hunt just may not be worth your time, and you can install the OS to one partition and the data to another

I got it to boot in the recovery console is there a way to uninstall the updates from here? Or just backup some of my data?