Not good. I have an XP based PC (AARGH!) that has been stable until recently. First i was getting BSOD on rare occasion, for no apparent reason. It was determined to be a bad memory module(failed memory torture test). After it was removed, all was well. Suprisingly stable system overall.
Now the horror. Last saturday i removed the CDRW/DVD combo driver and installed a new TDK DVDRW drive. As soon as Xp would get to the login screen I'd get a BSOD, and the system would reboot before i could even read the error message(~1 second). In disguist I flashed the MB with the latest bios(only changed seemed unrelated and insignificant), and updated the most recent VIA 4-in-1 driver pack(also seems unrelated and insignificant). XP itself is up to date.
Still no good. Now Xp will get past the login screen, but as soon as it detects the new drive I get the same BSOD. Growl.. Ok, i temporary put the drive on another PC(Win98), download the latest firmware and put it back in the other PC. No change.
I let a few days pass due to lack of time. Now yesterday I did further. suspecting there may be a hardware problem with the motherboard I put the old CDRW/DVD combo drive back in. Now it is doing the same thing! Shut down, go into Safe Mode. SAME THING! Disconnect the drive, no CD drives hooked up. Load Safe mode. Go into Device Manager. WTF? It's showing a SCSI controller and an Elby SCSI CDROM drive? I don't have ANY SCSI devices on this PC. :-( i tried to uninstall. IMMEDIATE BSOD and reboot(too fast to read). I try to disable the device, BSOD. Same sh--.
Now WTF? The DVD drive is likely good. Is this an ugly XP issue or a hardware MB issue? I guess the next step will be to reinstall XP to see what happens. I thought XP was supposed to be more stable to the point of no hard crashes :-?
