asked on

services.exe - bad image, even in safe mode, locked up

Dell Vostro 200, Windows XP Pro. When booting up would get multiple "bad image" errors with various files. Could log in, but within a few minutes it would reboot. Tried loading a previous restore point. That didn't work. Looked for solutions, did a repair from the original CD, now it locks up at the first error message. No mouse or keyboard.
Put in a new hard drive. When installing it gets to about 57% then reboots and gives an error "irq_not_less_or_equal_to" and refers to ntfs.sys.

Let me know what other information you need to help.
Thanks.

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

prelude812

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

SOLUTION

ComputerTechie

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

shadowz85

ASKER

Prelude812:
There are 4 memory chips. Assuming that it's not likely that they are all bad, I took them out a pair at a time and tried booting - same errors. I will try the video and visually checking the capacitors next
There is a newer bios on Dell, but there is no floppy drive and I tried burning a bootable CD using freedos and got a "Root Fat Kernel Go!" error.

Computer Techie:
The link you posted only refers to making floppies, but there is no floppy drive on this computer. It also mentions that a Dell Diagnostics CD should have been included in the original CDs, but it wasn't.

Thanks for the suggestions. I'm still open for more...

shadowz85

ASKER

I did run the most recent version of memtest86+. Apparently the chips weren't compatible with this software. While in the boot options, I found an embedded diagnostic which I ran and discovered one bad memory chip. Unfortunately, the original XP installation still won't boot, but I was able to install XP in another and it worked just fine once the bad chip was removed.