problem: can't start XP in any mode

midnightto6man,

To help diagnose this issue, please report the color of the Power and Diagnostic Lights.

The power light is solid green even after the failure. Each diagnostic light flashes several times, but none are illuminated when the blue screen appears, a few seconds after the windows logo first shows up.

midnightto6man,

This means the hardware is ok. When was the last time you backed up your data?

I have most of my essential data backed up, but there are a few things I'd really like to get back if it's at all possible. I just attempted a windows repair with the install CD, and it was unable to detect a hard disk, so I'm concerned my hard drive might be toasted.

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@midnightto6man wrote:
here's my issue: Starting yesterday, when turning on my computer I haven't been able to get XP (media center edition) to load in any mode. When I try in normal mode, after a few seconds a blue screen error appears, DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, with the driver iastor.sys. This happens regardless of whether I choose to start XP normally or boot to the last known good configuration. When I try to boot in safe mode, no blue screen appears but the loading hangs up at mup.sys. I haven't made any recent changes to the system, either hardware or software. It seems from reading other forums that many people have had similar problems, but I haven't had any success with any of their solutions so far. To be honest, I can't even figure out if it's a hardware or software problem. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks. System Specs: XPS 400 Windows Media Center 2005 Pentium D 820 Dual Core 1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2DIMMs 160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache

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.................................................................. I've had this problem, down to the DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL, with the driver iastor.sys and loading hangs up at mup.sys. and the blue-screen of death. It's a Hard drive failure in progress.. it may not be too late I've been able to get back to XPME (safe mode-with networking) and burn my data off to CDs. There are a few steps, starting on another computer with a floppy drive. (preferred) Go to Seagate and download the dos SEATOOLS floppy creator at: http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS.exe or download the CD image creator if you want to try to boot from a CD and have a machine that can burn the SeaTools CD at: http://www.seagate.com/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS.iso (these are direct download links) Create the SeaTools utility floppy disk/ SeaTools CD Boot to the SeaTools floppy disk./CD Agree to the EULA. SeaTools will completely identify your hard drive make/model/SN/ and features. It will tell you more of course if you have a Seagate or Maxtor drive, but they say that it will work on any Winchester drive. You can run the short test, but I'm sure it will fail. If you boot your machine and hit the F12 key when instructed and try booting to the Dell diagnostics partition and run the DST and it failed, it will fail here too. Run the Long Test. This test will soon start identifying drive errors. You want to stop the test with the ESC key prior to 99 errors and then have the software repair the errors (option 3). If you don't stop prior to 99 errors, the SeaTools will merely report that it found 99 errors and failed. Once you've had it repair the errors you will be returned to the test screen. Rerun the Long test and repair cycle... it will take many of these cycles.. be patient, get out your digital timer. After a long time... and you get down to Drive Passed, it's time to try out WinXP again. I'd seriously recommend only trying to boot to Safe Mode- with Networking" at this time because it loads a lot less from this fragile drive. Press the power button until the machine shuts off. Power up and keep your finger over the F8 key. When you see the Dell symbol you'll see ... F2...F12 in the top right corner. Slowly start tapping the F8 key. This will bring you to the Windows boot menu. You may run into WinXP not accepting your standard password, as it did me. Try to log into the Administrator account.. without a password. If that works and you get to windows, go to START/CONTROL PANEL/USER ADMINISTRATOR and instantly give that account a password. Also from here, reset your old password/s. Next I would logout of the administrator account and log into your account of choice. At this point, if everything has been following, you should be able to operate your CD burner software, and possibly also your internet connection. Burn CD's of your important DATA asap. From there, you're on your own. You may want to get a new harddrive and do a completely fresh install. I'm going to. If you're not going to get a new drive, you'll have a couple options yet. You can try to reinstall WinXP-ME from Dell's XP disk, it's bootable, you'll need to tell bios to NOT boot from the hard drive or floppy first. Install it into the same drive/directory when it asks: "Where do you want to install" 1) c:\windows your answer is "1" without the quotation marks Another solution with a fresh WinXP install is to do a low level drive format. ................................................................................................................................................................... WARNING: THIS WILL COMPLETELY REMOVE EVERYTHING FROM THE HARD DRIVE by writing zeros to every little bit of the drive (F2, back to bios and reenable the floppy-boot option.) Low level format is one of the options you'll find on the SeaTools disk, look at the help menu for more discription and instructions. After that you'll want to use Fdisk (on any variety of Windows boot disk; ie Win95/98/ME). Enable LBA, create a partition (go for the max). Set active that partition. At this point reboot, F2 back to bios and enable all of your drives; floppy/HD/CD as bootable devices. Now we're going to use the XP install CD and go for that fresh install. Good luck, and let me know if it worked for you too.