Octopus Overlords

I'm trying to get a machine fixed that's in a horrible place. It's a dell (and I have all of the dell utility software), and it really needs a clean start. The machine is overrun with spyware, maybe a virus, and mcafee. Performance ius awful (a couple of minutes from selecting a user to being able to launch a program).

I tried reinstalling windows from the Dell OS Cd. Everything went smoothly for about 20 minutes, until I got to roughly 34 minutes left ("installing devices"). There it kicks me to a blue screen where it mentions the "bad_pool_caller", and that I need to reboot. If this isn't the first time I've seen this screen, I need to uninstall any newly installed hardware. Or go into BIOS and disable memory options such as caching or shadowing. Well, I can't find any such BIOS options (there's some sort of "simplified" BIOS screen I assume Dell arranged for my pleasure, and it's just stuff like boot drive/order).

Restarting just goes back into setup, (39 minutes lefT), counts down to 34 doing the same stuff, rinse, repeat. I can't return to the previous known safe configuration or boot in safe mode or anything.

Also, I can't format the hard drive. It won't let me (saying the drive isn't able to be formatted or somesuch).

The only particular of note with this machine is that it just got some new RAM in it this AM (also the only RAM in it). I don't know if this is the original chip or not (I did observe it being installed). Originally, the system worked (just very sluggishly), leading me to think the RAM was ok.

I have no idea what is causing this, and I'm stumped. Any ideas?

I had this come up when I tried to do a System Recovery awhile ago, and a friend of mine recommended disabling the printer port in the bios. He didn't get into detail. I never got to try it out though because at that point the machine was just taken in for repairs.

If all else fails you'll probably have to get a new HD.

I'm pretty sure the reason you can't format is because the Dell OS CD won't let you, not because the HDD "isn't able to be formatted." It's a custom version of Windows that allows the end user limited control. You could try with a regular Windows OS CD. You'd lose all the Dell crap but would get a cleaner install. I think Dell reserves a partition for the OS and recovery info and the Dell disc won't let you change that.

Here's the error message

bad_pool_caller

It's a driver issue, but if you're doing a re-install it seems strange that it would happen. Like you said, maybe the Dell disc only works with the default hardware setup. If this is the case, you have to get your RAM back to the original amount, remove any new hardware, and put any old hardware back in.

Might be easier to get a regular Windows XP disc.



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Thanks for the tips, guys. We did have access to an XP disc, but it wasn't needed.

The ram in the machine was a 256mb stick. Turns out the machine originally had 512. Dell's wonderful customized version of XP was trying to write to a memory location that did not exist. Restoring tyhe second stick, and then switching their positions, fixed things (I had no say so in the stick not being there to begin with). Thanks, Dell! Superb idea.

Anyway, it's up and running. Performance is better post removal of Mcafee, and some spyware detection.