BleepingComputer.com: vista bsod

Well, I tried to install vista from scratch on my compaq - I wish I had just a vista disk but no, I had to operate from the disk that came with it, with the usual compaq crapware. But all did not go according to plan. I don't know if it's important but the computer came with a 250 gigabyte hard drive which is toast. Gotta hand it to western digital, they sure do know how to make hard drives that have an exact sense of the amount of time that passes whether the computer is used or not, so that they can fail a month out of warranty. So I tried to install onto a 1 terabyte seagate drive, but when it installed, it hung - in particular, at the end, there was something that took control of the screen and said that I had to wait for it to finish - well, 13 hours later, I stopped waiting, and discovered that vista was running and this thing was just covering up the desktop, and it was a process that could be minimized. It said it was 100% done installing "blocks" though it also said "waiting for block". I found in the root directory (c:) some directories that looked abnormal called the "blocks" directory and another one I don't remember, which I looked inside of and it was filled with hp crud. The name of the directory was XX_XX where the Xs are letters I don't remember (one of them was an F). I did a search on it and people seemed to say that they weren't needed, and some people said a good test was to put them in the recycle bin and if nothing bad happens after a few days, delete them. Which I did. Windows also installed some updates. And it had me reboot. And then, without being connected to the internet on rebooting, it somehow had 2 more updates to install. I did that and rebooted it again, and get this screen every time (see picture). It was very hard to photograph this since it is on the screen for about 40 milliseconds and my camera wouldn't take a picture for some random time between 1 and 4 seconds after I pushed the friggin' button, but here it is. Is this the standard vista blue screen of death or does it indicate something in particular that I might fix? Boy I hate vista already. Not even a day old and the operating system has by anything I've tried irretrievably crashed.

Whjat kind of drive did you replace it with?

It's a barracuda 700.11 ST31000340AS P/N: 9BX158-303 Firmware SD1A. Nominally 1 terabyte but you know how hard drive manufacturers like to lie and pretend a kilobyte is 1000 and not 1024 so they can claim their drives are bigger than they really are, so it's 931 gigabytes. Do you suppose the installation was wonky in the first place because the compaq install disks were expecting a 250 gigabyte drive and didn't know what to do with a terabyte drive?

I would run Hard Drive Diagnostics on it, because to me it sounds like the drive is failing.

It isn't. The problem is software, not hardware. I guess I'll try reinstalling it yet again and see if it goes the same exact same way, since no one who is reading this recognizes this problem. It's a good thing I didn't move too much back onto it before it failed. I wish I remembered the name of the directory I deleted right before, other than the c:\blocks directory, though I suspect it wouldn't make any difference how much I noticed or remembered. I was hoping that what I could provide from memory would ring bells and so I wouldn't have to remember everything precisely, but apparently this is a completely alien event to all of you. I also don't know what all those windows updates were, just that there were just short of 100 of them. Vista sure is fragile, and people sure don't understand it, it seems. It's too bad none of the drivers that work with the hardware on the computer actually work on XP or I would just have it with XP again. I don't know what to do with the thing, if I can expect the operating system to collapse in on itself after a few hours of mucking about. Maybe I should discard it and just use the hard drive for storage and not use the computer as an actual computer with an operating system, as it would be naive to expect a fresh install to not collapse in on itself after a short amount of time as well. It's a good thing I didn't move too much stuff over first.

This post has been edited by zorthargthedestroyer: 06 February 2012 - 01:52 AM

Vista is not fragile, I had Vista for well over a year and had no issues with it what so ever. I would highly recommend do a hard drive diagnostic with SeaTools from http://www.seagate.com. Deleting a directory will not cause the blue screen of death that you showed in your picture. You are having hardware issues not software issues.