Hi, hopefully I can explain this crazy mass of problems I'm having! I have a decent amount of computer experience but not so much with this sort of thing, so please, write any advice you give with that in mind.

A few weeks ago I used XP's disk compression to free up some room on my external HD. It went smoothly, with no report of errors. I rebooted afterwards, and Windows just hanged at a black screen, I think after the logo but before the logon screen. To play it safe I left it there for at least a half hour, and it never finished rebooting, so I pressed the power button on the tower to reboot and try again. Same thing. I finally unplugged my external (after power had been shut off I think) and then my computer would reboot normally. Up until yesterday I had rebooted several other times with the same hanging, unplugging the external and it working fine, etc.

So, yesterday. It had been a while since I rebooted, so I did so, and encountered a BSOD. I'm afraid I've seen SO many of them over the last 24 hours I can't remember exactly which one it was, because I got so many and some of them were blaming it on weird strings of numbers, and several were claiming there was an unexpected change in memory or something along those lines. I did the same thing I had done before: rebooted, attempted to log back on, got another BSOD, etc. Many times. I used another computer to look up some of them, but didn't get anywhere because everyone who had similar issues never followed up in their thread (on other sites) to explain what they did to resolve it! Useless. But during that time, I tried accessing Safe Mode and did so without success the first time (no text anywhere would load, oddly enough) but worked correctly after I rebooted again in Safe Mode. I did a brief check of the memory settings, seemed normal, rebooted again, and I believe it worked then. (Again, sorry this is vague, I have done these same things over and over MANY times in the last 24 hours now.) I counted myself lucky and left it in standby when I was done.

Unfortunately a terrible rainstorm happened this morning, and a well-meaning family member unplugged the computer to make sure it didn't get fried. Which meant it would reboot when I plugged it in again, and... yep, it didn't work. BSOD.

After a few failed attempts to boot into Safe Mode (BSOD upon doing so), I finally got it to work and ran the "check disk for errors" thing (sorry, exact name escaping me right now). I ran it first on my external HD, and it reported no errors. Did the same for my regular HD, and same thing -- no errors. So I rebooted, blah blah, you get the point. BSOD after BSOD, no luck whatsoever. At this point I was getting BSODs with win32k.sys errors, so I googled it and saw someone who recommended renaming the darn thing to win32k.old, closing the window, and going back to see that it had created a new win32k.sys file. I tried it, and it didn't. I thought, "Well, it'll probably create a new one if I reboot!" HUGE mistake. I rebooted, and got a fatal system error with some numbers. (I can double check this if the exact details are needed.) Lovely. Now I can't boot into Safe Mode, or do ANYTHING -- just that same fatal system error message.

And, I neglected to mention one more thing, sorry: I also read about the driver verifier thing built into Windows, and forgot to turn it off before I made my terrible, terrible win32k.sys mistake. So even if it doesn't tell me the fatal system error, it gives me a BSOD with some info about a driver. Is there any way to turn the darn thing off without booting into Safe Mode and doing it through the command line?

Here are the various BSOD error messages I've gotten:

BAD_POOL_CALLER
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Again, there were others, such as win32k.sys messages. If it helps, the BSOD the driver verifier gives says: IO SYSTEM VERIFICATION ERROR IN HIDCLASS.SYS (WDM DRIVER ERROR 22e) HIDCLASS.SYS +1902 at BA5D7902

Also, if this helps, it's a Dell Dimension 3000 with XP (I believe service pack 3) and it's from 2005. Because it's a crappy Dell, they didn't give me a Windows CD. I do have a friend's, but it's for a slightly different version of XP, so maybe it's unhelpful.

I've probably irreparably screwed it up, but hopefully someone here can help me. (It's sad how as it becomes worse, you'd be thankful to just have it as bad as you had it before!) Sorry for the loooong description of my computer troubles. Thanks for any help!

Hello & Welcome candybar!

PCHF has some staff with EXCELLENT BSOD skills You're in good hands here. I'll get this relocated to our BSOD forum with a 2 day redirect in place for you.

In the meantime, please use this guide to post any BSOD mini dump logs that your computer has captured.

Thanks! A BSOD-specific forum is a much better fit, silly I didn't notice it!

I would post those logs, but as it is, my computer is inaccessible in any way to do something like that. Even Safe Mode gives a BSOD, hence my problem. :/

Hello Candy, welcome to PCHF.

I've noticed the same black screen hang related to storage devices and all versions of Windows XP, where Windows is no doubt trying to access the device at that stage and freezes. I've yet to find a fix for this, but appears to only occur with specific models. Certainly not related to your other problems though.

Not sure where you found advice on renaming the win32k.sys file.. that has to be the worst advice I've ever heard, unless the intention was to restore a good copy of that file from CD first. win32k.sys is an important part of Windows, and is often to blame in a lot of stop errors. As it turns out, with all the stop errors that point to this system file, it has never actually been the direct cause of any problems in my experience.

Do you think you might have accidentally thrown the CD away? It usually comes in a thin brown box with the keyboard, mouse and some documentation. The CD itself in normally green or blue depending on the version of Windows you have. Dell always send out CD's with their PC's, but then, customers in the U.S. seem to have a very different experience to Dell than in the UK. Over here, their customer support is second to none. If you haven't received your CD, then your entitled to it! Contact them and ask for your CD, because guarantee'd, you'll need it at some point.. possibly later on as we work to resolve these problems. Let's get you back into Windows to start with.

As long as you haven't been back into Windows since enabling driver verifier, you'll be able to disable it by loading the "Last Known Good Configuration" option at the F8 startup menu. If not, your left with very few options.

From the Console
you'll either need the Setup CD, or you can create a CD called NTFS4DOS. This will give you access to the command console, but obviously won't have access to any of the files you would have from the Setup CD.

From the console, you'll need to restore the registry, from where driver verifier is enabled:
To fix win32k.sys:
Finally, restart and you should be able to access Windows normally.

Repair install
You can only use a Windows Setup CD for this. Insert it into the PC during startup. During the initial setup screen to install Windows, press [Enter], and then take the option to repair. If your asked to format the drive, then you have gone too far!

--
With the various stop errors you have received as well, they are commonly the result of faulty memory. This is something we can look at later. Once your up and running in Windows again, we can take a look at the logs and go from there.

Wish I'd known this at the time! Oh well...

Nope, never came with one. Dell is very cheap with us here in the US! I need to send away for one.

Pretty sure I had, unfortunately, because it didn't make any difference. :/

Well, I borrowed my friend's Windows XP CD and could get the CD to boot. (Had to set it to prioritize the CD drive or whatever, though.) In the recovery console, I typed all of the commands with the exception of the "ren software software.old" (I'm afraid I accidentally missed it). Unaware of my mistake I continued on to the next part, and didn't have any problem up until typing in "copy system C:\windows\system32\config\system". It would just say the file could not be found. So at this point, I realized I'd forgotten to type the software one, so I went back (yes, to the correct folder ) and typed the software one in. Seemed to work. Then I went back to that other folder, and tried typing that same command (the copy system... etc) and still said the file could not be found. So I tried the rest of the commands, and those went fine. :/

Then I did the win32k.sys fix, and it seemed to work fine. However, Windows seems to behaving very oddly. If I turn the computer on (without the Windows CD in the drive), it will let me select different boot options (the various Safe Modes, last known good configuration, regular Windows, etc.) but all of them result in the same thing: black screen hanging there forever. I did figure out that if I touched literally any key it would just reboot and ask me the same options, which is pretty weird. Any ideas?

Sorry, can you give me a little more detail with this? Unless I'm misunderstanding something, I think the only options the CD gives me on the main menu is install, recovery console, and exit. I think "enter" is install... is that really safe to select? I'd really rather not risk deleting everything, although if that's the only way to get my computer working again, I'd do it. I can double check but I think those are the options.

Thanks for your help so far!

After the last command "cd windows\repair" can you confirm the prompt changes to c:\windows\repair>_

Yeah, you'll see further options after you press [Enter], but there are some pre-requisites before you go ahead, because your using somebody else's CD. Make sure the CD is the same version (Home, Pro, Media Center), with the same service pack (most likely SP3). When it comes to activation, you'll need to contact Microsoft directly to get your product key changed to match the XP license sticker which is often found on the side of the PC, otherwise you'll be running with an illegal copy. If you decide to go down this route, I'll see if I can find some more detailed instructions for you.

Thanks for all your help so far, but I still need a little more clarification. I really want to make sure I've done each step correctly before crossing it off my list and moving on to other options. I'm concerned that I wasn't fully able to repair the registry value in the "copy system C:\windows\system32\config\system" step. I think I understand the purpose of doing this in the recovery console, but I wonder if the start-up issues I'm having now (sort of a reboot loop) are due to not having fixed that one troublesome value.

Can you guide me through re-doing that part? It looked like all the other files copied correctly. Is it possible that the particular file wasn't on the version of the XP disk I was using (Media Center edition)? Tracking down the original Windows disk and making everything look kosher to Microsoft will take a while, and I'm willing to do it if necessary, but I'm not sure if you are saying that I need to do all that as part of the next step OR as a completely separate fixing method.