Blue Screen of Death after Virgin XP ReInstall

March 2, 2006 9:00 AM

I'm getting the blue screen of death right after reinstalling windows XP and the drivers

...and I'm not sure why. It's an HP laptop, less than a year old. I am reinstalling from the CD (not from within Windows), deleting partition and creating a new one. I have the HP drivers disk. I download some of the windows updates, virus protection, firewall, etc., then I get the blue screen STOP error that says I might have a device driver problem. The computer won't even give me the option to start in Safe Mode - I get a black screen (although I can get into the diagnostics).

This has happened twice already. First time I updated bios right away and second time I didn't. Any ideas what's going on? The weird thing is that the computer was actually running for a while before it died the second time -I'd already installed a bunch of programs and rebooted a dozen times.

posted by BigBrownBear to computers & internet (4 comments total)

I've seen XP do some wierd stuff from driver problems with ACPI, and since this is a laptop, that might be a good lead...
posted by jackofsaxons at 10:02 AM on March 2, 2006

ok, that's a good lead. i'll see if there are updates for those drivers
posted by BigBrownBear at 10:30 AM on March 2, 2006

Definitely Sounds like a driver issue, the best thing to do is to install a clean xp, grab either the Service Pack 2 CD, or the IT Pro exe, unless your XP has SP2 integrated.

Install that, then grab the latest drivers for all your hardware from HP's website or their various vendors. If the problem persists, check your RAM, I've had similar problems with my desktop system after the ram started dying, replacing the RAM stopped all my issues.
posted by Hexidecimal at 11:30 AM on March 2, 2006

I might have a device driver problem

For what it's worth, this is pretty much a general error message Windows spits out when it doesn't really know what the problem is (the status quo). Check your drivers first, but keep in mind the problem probably lies somewhere else.
posted by muddgirl at 2:46 PM on March 4, 2006