WinXP : stop 0x0000000a during safe mode startup

Got an old XP home box in today that wouldn't boot. Regular windows boot just hangs halfway through loading, and safe mode produces a BSOD with STOP code 0x0000000a.

this code normally points to bad drivers or to faulty RAM. with it happening during safe mode, we can happily rule out most cases of bad drivers. so i ran memtest86 for a couple of hours and it didn't produce any errors. normally I'd run memtest for at least 12 hours before accepting a "pass" result, but given that the symptoms are showing so quickly (during bootup) i figured a couple of hours should be enough.

to be sure, i then swapped the RAM out for some sticks i've got lying around, and it still would not boot, and still produced the same BSOD.

the next task was to start eliminating pieces of hardware, and during this process i discovered that pulling the power to the two CD drives enabled the system to boot. however there was clearly not a hardware fault with the drives themselves, as having either one of them powered up prevented the system from booting.

so, with the 2 drives disabled, i booted the system, and saw that the most recent software that was installed was an old version of roxio easy cd creator. so i uninstalled this, and ran the registry patch available from http://www.aumha.org which forces windows to re-install the cd drives upon next reboot. sure enough, with the drives re-connected, windows booted successfully.

conclusion : the roxio software had installed a driver for the CD drives (most likely for UDF support) which was faulty or incompatible with the system. as windows will always load the drivers for CD drives even in safe mode, there was no way to uninstall the driver or roll back the system without first disconnecting the drives.

New blog

So I've decided to start a blog. I'll be posting various HOWTOs on PC repair, as much for my own benefit (i can't remember everything!) as anyone elses. Each time i encounter a new or interesting problem, i'll post the solution here. Hopefully over time this will become a useful repository of information.