I went on vacation. Came home. LCD monitor was very dim. I could turn off, then turn on the monitor to get a second of normal viewing before it went dim again. I thought this may be some sort of recent problem (hoping my monitor hadn't ****ped out), so I tried a system restore, having to switch the monitor on and off frequently to see what I was doing. Anyway, after the restore I had gotten to the login page (with the different user accounts) and stepped away for a few moments. When I came back the screen was still dark, so I turned off the computer and switched out to an old CRT monitor I have. When I tried starting up, the computer went through everything normal, but after the little blue thing scrolled across the bottom a few times on the splash screen, my comp would restart--going back to the motherboard screen and into a continuous loop of this until I shut it down. I tried a repair with the XP cd I have, but came up with BSOD-- BAD_POOL_CALLER 0x000000c2 (0x00000043, 0xc55D0000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). I then tried installing XP onto an old hard drive that I installed into the comp, setting the original as a slave. This allowed me to at least see most of my stuff on the original drive, but I can't get into some of my files as they are under a password protected account (I keep getting access denied). Some of these files are irreplaceable and would at the VERY least like to be able to access these files so I can back them up and do a fresh install. Ideally I would like to be able to fix the original install so I can get back up to normal running order. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Hya Dropmurphy , welcome to PCHF.

So the pc/monitor works ok with an other HD and fresh windows install?

Then the problem must be a damaged HD , but imo it doesn't sound like that is it , or it is an software problem.

Can you boot in to safemode with the old drive? (hit f8 when booting up) If yes , first try to uninstall and reinstall the video driver.



But if we cant get it to work again , getting access to youre files shouldn't be a mayer prob i hope , have a look at the two links here:

http://www.pchelpforum.com/118212-post2.html

Thanks. Yeah, I ended up taking control of the files that I absolutely needed and transferring them, then doing a fresh install of windows. The hard drive was definitely not the problem. I'm still not exactly sure what it was, but I needed a fresh install right about now anyway, so since I'm back up in working order I'm probably not going to look into it further. So far everything is working OK, I just wish I could figure out what happened to my original monitor. This old CRT just doesn't live up to the far superior LCD that I had. I think I'm just going to have to get it repaired, or save up and spring for a new one. I'd like to know why it ****ped out though so it doesn't happen again in the future. Thanks again for the help.