Dell blue screen and quit when booting

billschillin

Honorable
Oct 23, 2012
3
0
10,510
Hello,
I have a Dell inspiron 8600 laptop. win xp sp3 and all updates. Clean OS install, updated java runtime, Adobe flash, Avast antivirus, spyware blaster, silverlight and no other programs. Went to Dell sight and, using my service tag number updated any drivers that needed updating. All worked great, then created a disk image with Macrium reflect.
Now the problem. It stared randomly just quitting. It would make a sound much like the 'pop' of a dirty LP record album then go to a blue screen for a split second, then shut off. The blue screen is quick but I have been able to see that it notes an IRQ conflict in the first line. In the beginning you could just turn it back on and it would work. Then it started blue screening while booting but not every time. Sometimes it booted just fine. I re-installed from my image just in case something became corrupted and it did work ok briefly. Now it will not fully boot at all. It makes it to the "windows is starting" progress bar and after maybe 10-15 seconds it quits. I did the Dell Diagnostics from the F12 during boot and I am getting an error saying that the display inverter cannot be detected which seems odd because the display works fine and the backlight is fine. I can boot linux from a CD distro and everything works fine. All other tests came back 'passed' I did the short and the long test both.
I'm hesitant to blame hardware since linux works fine but it is working from a cd rather than the hard drive but I don't believe the problem is the hard drive .
What do you think??
 

wanderer11

Honorable
Jun 11, 2012
98
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10,590
I am assuming you didn't turn off automatic restart and that is why you only see the blue screen for a split second. http://pcsupport.about.com/od/windows7/ht/automatic-restart-windows-7.htm
Follow that to turn it off and then you will have a chance to read the whole thing next time. Now if it says IRQ it is probably "DRIVER IRQL NOT LESS THAN OR EQUAL" Can you boot into safe mode ok? It sounds like you do have a driver conflict somewhere.
 

billschillin

Honorable
Oct 23, 2012
3
0
10,510


Thank you for your answer.
I can not get into safe mode at this point either.
I turned auto reboot off and the message is as you say above but I can't for the life of me figure what IRQ is the problem. Is there any test to assess this that can be used without windows being active?

The technical information shown at the bottom of the blue screen is as follows:
***STOP: 0x0000000A (0xF78AB190,0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0x804D9BBA)
WHAT EVER THIS MEANS IF ANYTHING AT ALL.
On a whim I removed my wireless card ( it was the last thing I installed) and rebooted and it fired up.
So, I guess the next question is what is recommended to do to fix this so I can use my wireless card?

What is really odd is that it was working fine with the configuration and drivers it had. I was using the internet and accessing other computers on my network and all seemed fine. It just blue screened randomly ( or it at least seems random to me ) unless this thing changed the drivers on it's own I am baffled. Any thought on the matter????
 

billschillin

Honorable
Oct 23, 2012
3
0
10,510
No, I unplugged the wireless card. I cannot uninstall the drivers, they do not show up in the device manager. I even went to the link suggested and unhid the devices but there is nothing there. any suggestions?