I have been trying to help my neighbor fix his stupid compaq computer now for over a week. It started when he was getting blue screened as soon as windows booted so we decided to reformat and start anew. Well, i deleted the "secret" compaq partition that holds all the restore info by accidnet so we had to get the Full Restore Cd's. But now even after formating the whole hd with fdisk to wipe it i still am getting all kinds of errors in the restore process. It will get to windows but once it starts restoring all the factory software it crashed to bluescreen. I am comming to the conclusion that there must be some sort of hardware malfunction. Any ideas? it is a compaq model 5wv261 if that helps. Also the errors i was getting in windows were 0028:C000D17F in VxD VMM(O1)+0000C17F and 0028:C0011492 in VxD VMM01+00010492. Thanks Guys, Sam I hate this thing.

Until someone with a better idea comes along, I would try booting with a start-up disk and at the A:\ prompt, type C:\ then press ENTER. At the C:\ prompt type scandisk and press ENTER. This will look for bad sectors on the hard drive and learn to avoid them. You will then have to format C: and reinstall Windows. These bad areas will not get written on. This is free while someone else will suggest you try taking out a stick of RAM to see if it's a memory issue (or something else).

1. That Compaq is not stupid...it's just as smart as any other machine. 2. You deleted the partition that hold all the info that Compaq needs to be configured. 3. You need to recreate that partition and the info that was on it. 4. I don't know what you mean by full restore cd? Something you got from Compaq? Have a look on this page: http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList?dlc=en&lc=en&product=93919&lang=en&cc=us&os=209 under the ROMPaq and Utility sections. Skip

if i run scandisk and dont find any bad sectors is it still possible that my hd could be going bad? By full restore i mean The dual Quick Restore Cd's that i got from compaq. Thanks, Sam

You might run fdisk, option 4 to see if you have one or two partitions on your hdd. If memory serves, you should have a 2 or 6Mb non dos partition and then the whatever size fat32 partition. Skip

The 2 'Quick Restore' CDs should re-create the partition for you - have done 3 of these in the past with no problems. (1) Are you certain you have the correct restore disks - As far as I know Compaq still send them out free if you supply them with the serial number so it may be worth requesting another set, if they'll let you (tell them they're corrupt or something). (2) It's worth (as already suggested) doing a full scan of the HD - preferably with the HD manufacturer's own utility. (3) As you were originally getting blue screen problems I'd check all hardware that you can - PSU voltages (in BIOS), Mem-check for the RAM etc. "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

The errors you were getting usually mean that the chipset drivers are not up to date. If you reformat the drive, the chipset drivers need to be reinstalled first and updated.