Dak Lander Posted June 26, 2005 Share Posted June 26, 2005 OK, here's the deal. This box is my daily use box, internet & etc, along with non-essential recording, mixing and so on. I do however, use it as a second business computer so there is email that I'm going to need. Athlon XP2000 with 384MB RAM, "C", "HDA" drive is 20gig and the "D" & "E", "HDB" drive is a split partition 40 gig drive. The "C" drive is NTFS, the "D" is Linux and "E" is FAT 32 running Windows 2000 PRO. I had a Mepis version of Linux on this box and it worked pretty well, so well infact that when they came out with an update I decided to install it on this box. I did the same thing on my other computer and it was fine. This one had some issues with the GRUB loader and apparently hosed the boot sectors. I've done the MBR fix thing, tried all the Win2K repair options and a re-install, all to no avail. I'm now getting a Stop error 0xoooo..... Driver-IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL Address BFE29B94 at BFE29000 Datestring 3a640ab6 portcls.sys What in the world is going on? I had a copy of Damn Small Linux I booted and installed. That's what I'm on now. I've mounted the drives and it looks like all my information is there on the "C" drive so I'm not totally screwed and can recover but would like some help in figuring out if I can salvage the drive without doing the complete re-locate info to the other drive and reformat and re-install dance. Also, what do you suppose occured to cause this glitch? I've been beating on this thing for a couple of days now... No response from the Mepis forums on the original issue on live cd boot and install. That was the system trying to load Open Office. Anyone with an idea??? 06/28/05 UPDATE! I have made some progress. Got to safe mode and ran a spyware check. That got a few items so maybe that was part of the problem. I also did some registry tweaking. There are still issues with the system trying to load program install files but it's been running in normal mode without a memory dump now for about 4 hours. looks like I'll have to reinstall some programs, some just so I can un-install them. Funny thing is I can't un-install some programs that I would like to get rid of. Some way this thing now looks for a MSI file and of course they are not on the machine, nor on disks. Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dementia13 Posted June 27, 2005 Share Posted June 27, 2005 Unless someone's seen that very error and knows what to do, that sounds like a pretty difficult kind of problem to troubleshoot from a distance. The good news is that your information's still there. Does Mepis have a graphical installer? You might have missed an option when it came time to select OSes for the boot menu. I wonder if a reinstall of Mepis would set you straight? That error doesn't sound like a boot issue so much as it sounds like a hardware problem: some kind of IRQ conflict. It's giving a memory address, and if you're getting that far, Windows has been located and is at least trying to boot. Did you change any BIOS settings like "Plug'n'Play aware OS enabled"? You typically have to leave that disabled for Linux, and if you change that after Windows is already installed it's going to reorder your IRQ allocation and confuse Windows. That's something that a reinstall should fix. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dak Lander Posted June 27, 2005 Author Share Posted June 27, 2005 Originally posted by dementia13: Unless someone's seen that very error and knows what to do, that sounds like a pretty difficult kind of problem to troubleshoot from a distance. The good news is that your information's still there. Does Mepis have a graphical installer? Yes You might have missed an option when it came time to select OSes for the boot menu. I followed the same procedure that I did on the other computer, formatted the Linux and swap partitions and chose the MBR on the "C" drive for the place to place the GRUB installer. I wonder if a reinstall of Mepis would set you straight? Mepis won't re-install. In fact it won't boot the live cd now either. I burned another copy at a much slower burn rate thinking it may have been corrupted by too fast a burn. That didn't make any difference. That error doesn't sound like a boot issue so much as it sounds like a hardware problem: some kind of IRQ conflict. It's giving a memory address, and if you're getting that far, Windows has been located and is at least trying to boot. It gives the error and does the memory dump when it gets to loading my settings and profile and Win2K has, upon rare occasion, gotten through that only to blow up in a short while. The last time was when I ran a spyware detection program thinking that may be part of the issue. Did you change any BIOS settings like "Plug'n'Play aware OS enabled"? No! Never touched the bios settings. You typically have to leave that disabled for Linux, and if you change that after Windows is already installed it's going to reorder your IRQ allocation and confuse Windows. That's something that a reinstall should fix. Re-installing windows did nothing to correct the problem.Oh, I have not been able to boot into safe mode for a couple of days either. Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dementia13 Posted June 27, 2005 Share Posted June 27, 2005 Mepis won't re-install. In fact it won't boot the live cd now either. That's a red flag. Again, that sounds like a BIOS setting that would cause the system not to boot from a CD. But it sounds like a separate problem. The last time was when I ran a spyware detection program thinking that may be part of the issue. Do you have any good registry backups that you can restore to? Right about now, if the computer were in my hands, I'd be removing every non-essential piece of hardware, all PCI cards, to see if the trouble would clear up. Then, I'd start removing memory modules to see if one of those is bad. I'd strip the system down to it's most basic to isolate the OS as much as possible. If the trouble clears up, then you can find out which piece of hardware is causing the trouble. And the whole process of redetecting the hardware might also clear things up. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rim Posted June 27, 2005 Share Posted June 27, 2005 Originally posted by 4-DakRecorder: I'm now getting a Stop error 0xoooo..... Driver-IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL Address BFE29B94 at BFE29000 Datestring 3a640ab6 portcls.sys IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL usually points to some kind of hardware/driver problem. The Stop error is actually important as is portcls.sys. Search http://support.microsoft.com for portcls and also the stop error. Microsoft's Knowledgebase usually "shorthands" the stop error by omitting the zeroes after the 'X' so if your stop error was 0x0000000A, search for 0xA. See if any of the search returns applies to your situation. Even if it doesn't, it may be worth reading it anyway. aka riffing Double Post music: Strip Down http://rimspeed.com http://loadedtheband.com Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Flier Posted June 27, 2005 Share Posted June 27, 2005 Dak, did you install any new hardware or drivers at around the same time? That error usually happens when there's a hardware or driver problem... either video card, USB drivers, sometimes even the mouse. Have you tried booting from the Win 2K recovery console? It will allow you to load drivers one at a time so you can see which one causes the BSOD. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Flier Posted June 27, 2005 Share Posted June 27, 2005 Dak, I found this on a techie forum and it sums up the possibilities and solutions pretty well: This is usually a device error - part of a memory dump for any of a variety of issues but usually a device driver or a cable error, in my experience. We often see it in the early stages of an ATI graphics driver failure. It usually has to do with the following: Memory error due to small memory defect in memory module or AGP video memory. Failure of device or device drive of one of these: Video, Audio, NIC, modem. Failure of IDE/EIDE/ATA cable as it hardens and shrinks from age. Device order error on IDE/EIDE/ATA cable where Cable Select is being used but the primary device is NOT on the end of the cable. (On cable select, master is at end, slave is in the middle. Microsoft has its own theories. You can do a search of their knowledge base or try: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb:en-us;314063. If that doesn't work quite right, search for 314063 in the knowledge base. Also could be a registry corruption error. The tricks. 1. Download and resinstall drivers for all devices. 2. Download Memtest86 and test your memory for about three hours of iterations. 3. Check all your IDE/EIDE/ATA cables. If you have an ATA drive that is on an old style cable, change to ATA cable with 80 conductor - 40 connector. Also a common error when someone upgrades to Windows 2000 or Windows XP from an earlier OS. Only fix in this case is to do a clean install on a formatted disk. Registry error problems can be fixed by restarting in Safe Mode (pressing the F8 key) at least three or four times. This will fix errors in your registry that will get rid of a lot of such problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dak Lander Posted June 27, 2005 Author Share Posted June 27, 2005 Thanks for the links, I'll search those out as time allows. I can boot from the cd and burner drives from other OS's, just not Mepis. I live booted Damn Small Linux and installed it with no problems. I made no changes to the system, either bios settings or hardware. F8 will not bring up Safe Mode. It only gets me to a multiple boot screen that allows me to boot from various sources, not OS's. I swapped memory modules in and out and from slot to slot. There are no cards in this computer, I'm running all onboard stuff, video, sound, ethernet card and modem. Lee, this was a solid, well running existing dual-boot system with Windows 2000K PRO and Mepis Linux. All I did was attempt an install of a newer Mepis distribution. That same distro installed and updated on my other computer with the same dual-boot operating systems and seems to run just fine. I'll try the Recovery Console again. I did not see the opportunity to manually load drivers so I'll look again. I do know that it get through all the basic loads and system loads. It fails when it's nearly through loading my personal settings. Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Flier Posted June 27, 2005 Share Posted June 27, 2005 Originally posted by 4-DakRecorder: I'll try the Recovery Console again. I did not see the opportunity to manually load drivers so I'll look again.From the console, if you type "LISTSVC" it will tell you all of the drivers and services that are installed and what their start options are. You can then disable any that might be causing a problem (or disable them one at a time to see if it's the culprit) using the DISABLE command. Just be sure to do them one at a time and re-ENABLE the driver or service if it wasn't the one that caused the problem. Although if you can't even boot up in Safe mode, it may be that Windows simply thinks your hard drive is corrupt, with all the messing around you've been doing with drive partitioning and the boot loader etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dak Lander Posted June 27, 2005 Author Share Posted June 27, 2005 Originally posted by Lee Flier: Although if you can't even boot up in Safe mode, it may be that Windows simply thinks your hard drive is corrupt, with all the messing around you've been doing with drive partitioning and the boot loader etc. There again, I made no changes to the partitions. I left them as they were because that second drive was an evenly split FAT32 and Linux and Swap partitions. and the system never crashed. I tired going back to the last known good boot and that was no-go too. Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dak Lander Posted June 27, 2005 Author Share Posted June 27, 2005 Ah, I see a blurb about CD Creator. I thought I'd un-installed that but that may have been on the to-do list and not yet done. If I can get to safe mode I'll check that again. Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dak Lander Posted June 28, 2005 Author Share Posted June 28, 2005 See update in initial thread, if you're interested... Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lee Flier Posted June 28, 2005 Share Posted June 28, 2005 Dak, Glad you've made some progress. To find the installer programs that are trying to load, check the registry under both HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and HKEY_LOCAL_USER. Since you got the errors when it was loading your personal settings, I would suspect HKEY_LOCAL_USER. But look for the following keys under both: Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\RunOnce Most installer programs load under RunOnce. Now that you can boot you should be able to get rid of anything you don't want. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Franknputer Posted June 28, 2005 Share Posted June 28, 2005 >If true LINUX_DETECTED Run Screw_Entire_Drive.Exe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dak Lander Posted June 28, 2005 Author Share Posted June 28, 2005 Originally posted by Christopher Robin: >If true LINUX_DETECTED Run Screw_Entire_Drive.Exe Heh, That's what it seems like on that particular computer. Our Joint "When you come slam bang up against trouble, it never looks half as bad if you face up to it." The Duke... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AudioMaverick Posted June 28, 2005 Share Posted June 28, 2005 Hey, Dak... Microsoft says... Introduction To Port Class "... PortCls is implemented in system file portcls.sys as an export driver (a kernel-mode DLL) that provides kernel-streaming functionality for ISA/DMA and PCI audio device drivers. The portcls.sys file contains the following: * A set of helper functions that can be called by the adapter driver * A collection of audio port drivers ..." Have you tried uninstalling your sound cards (audio interfaces)? "It's all about the... um-m-m, uh-h-h..." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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