BSOD before welcome screen!

[zaid786]

Hi, I'm getting a blue screen of death when booting windows vista which occurs before the welcome screen shows up. The stop error message is as follows:

***STOP 0x0000007F (0x00000008, 0x8014B000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

It also says about checking my memory for errors, video card etc etc and general hardware stuff which does not seem to help.

Some facts about the setup of my pc:

I'm running a dual boot of 2 operating systems, with 1 hard drive with windows xp pro, and the other hard drive with windows vista ultimate. Windows XP works perfectly (so this rules out the hardware problems I think) and the problem is occuring with windows vista only.
I thought it was due to some software changes I made as of late, the 2 main ones I can think of were:
1) Installing a new version of my antivirus (NOD32 v3)
2) Attempting to patch tcpip.sys to remove the concurrent connections limit

What I've tried so far:

In safe mode:

1) Undo all the changes I've made to tcpip.sys and restoring it back to the original.
2) Uninstalling NOD32 v3.
3) Cleaning with CCleaner
4) Uninstalling my ethernet cards drivers

From the other OS (Windows XP):

1) Full in depth system scan with NOD32 v2 of both hard drives.
2) Attempting to look up similiar BSOD's with my stop error which all relate to hardware problems, but I'm pretty sure its something to do with software but can't figure out what.

Strangely enough I can only access safe mode, safe mode with networking gives a BSOD (the same one), normal boot gives a BSOD, last known configuration does not work either.

Hardware Specifications:

Gigabyte GA-K8N51GMF-9 Socket 939 Motherboard
AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Socket 939)
2x1GB DDR400 Corsair RAM
Maxtor 6G160E0 160GB S-ATA Hard Drive (with vista)
Maxtor 6Y080P0 80GB IDE Hard Drive (with xp)
Nvidia Geforce 7600GS (Manufacturer Overclocked to 1.55GHz effective memory clock, and 550Mhz core clock)
LG DVD Writer RAM Drive

Details about Windows Vista:

All updates installed
All drivers upto date.
Main software installed:

Adobe Photoshop CS3
Adobe Reader 8.11
Ares P2P 2.0.9.3030
Ccleaner
Brain Lara Cricket 2007
Daemon Tools 4.10
Command & Conquer 3 Tiberium Wars
eMule 0.48
ImgBurn 2.3.2.0
Internet Explorer 7
Java Runtime 6 (Update 3)
K-lite Mega Codec Pack 3.5.3
Limewire Pro
Messenger Plus! Live 4.23
Microsoft Office 2007
Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.9
Nero Micro 8.1
Nvidia nTune 5.5
Realtek High Definition Audio Driver R1.80
Virtua Tennis 3
Sopcast 1.1.2
TVUPlayer 2.3.2.52
Windows Live Messenger 8.5
Windows Media Player 10
WinRAR 3.71

Would be most grateful for any help! If anyone needs any more info just ask! Thanks!

[michael123]

have you installed any new components recently? these could be incompatible with vista but OK with XP. If you have take these out. Does vista have system restore? Access this in safe mode and use it if possible. If the worst comes to the worst you may have to reinstall, but you should be able to salvage your files via use of your other OS.

[zaid786]

Any new components I can think of are a gamepad a bought, its called nyko airflo, i've used it so many times in vista to play games and it works perfectly. Don't think it could be that. About reinstalling thats not really a solution is it, its a last resort. The reason why I'm so reluctant to reinstall vista is because I want to keep a dual boot. And by formatting one hard drive it would mess up the dual boot as the boot loader is saved on vista's hard drive.

[michael123]

system restore? you could also try to eradicate all recently installed programs completely, uninstalling then deleting anything left in program files. Also get a decent malware checker, I'd recommend adaware and spybot search and destroy (http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html) DON'T get spybot S&D off anywhere else, there are a lot of imitation virus versions on google, get it from the proper site. I got BSOD once from malware. Once these are run if they don't turn anything up also scan with windows defender and AVG free. It will take time but better than uninstalling. Be patient. The most likely thing seems to me to be that the tcpip.sys patching did something. Try to do everything possible to undo changes made here, double check everything to do with it. Also as a second to last resort try putting in the vist CD and seeing if you can repair your OS, but this can cause problems (i.e. make you have to reinstall, so only try if all else fails. Hope this helps.

[zaid786]

I checked that also, I don't have any restore points saved! :o

[michael123]

The fact that it boots in safe mode makes me think it is definately malware (not necessarily virus: try spybot S&D but also try AVG as well as your existing anti-virus, some clever viruses hide well) or tcpip.sys patching. Safe mode probably work because it doesn't load a virus or doesn't load tcpip.sys. To be honest, that is as much help as I can give. Don't be impatient though, I know it is very annoying, but you will save yourself time in the long term by taking a very close look at both viruses with AVG and at tcpip.sys.

[zaid786]

The thing is I've already scanned it with NOD32 Antivirus which has the highest detection rates compared to any other antivirus and malware program, and it didn't find anything. I also scanned it with spyware doctor v5 which is also well known for its antispyware detection. Yeh I have a feeling its the patched tcpip.sys. What I've done to replace the original is i downloaded the original file from another forum and replaced it with the existing one. Shouldn't that remove the patch?

[michael123]

it should, but I do not know to what extent tcpip.sys is customised to your computer. Have you tried getting it from the recycling bin? If it is empty there are plenty of free programs out there which can salvage files which have been emptied from the bin. Try to get yours back and make sure it is in exactly the right place. If what you say about your antivirus is right, I would still try windows defender or something unless your AV does anti spyware/malware. Other things besides straightforward viruses can damage your computer.

[zaid786]

NOD32 is a complete malware program and includes antispyware, I would strongly recommend it to anyone. I guess theres no harm to try others just to be on the safe side. The problem is that I didn't actually keep the original tcpip.sys. What I've done is I followed steps on a website to manually patch tcpip.sys through command prompt and then copy over the patched tcpip.sys file that the website provided. But then half way through that method I read the bottom of the page and there was a program that did all that automatically in a script or something and I used that instead. Then after restarting my PC I couldn't get back onto vista. Since then I've tried undoing the changes that the script did because it came with a backup file. But what its actually done is revert it back to the file that I used earlier from the website and not back to the proper original tcpip.sys. So what I did was to download the original tcpip.sys from the internet and I replaced it in the system32/drivers folder by changing the permissions through windows XP. Hope this makes sense and should have made it more clear earlier. The website I used was:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/04/09/windows-vista-tcpipsys-connection-limit-patch-for-event-id-4226/

[zaid786]

Another thing I'm unsure of is wether the changes I made only changed things in tcpip.sys and not any other files?

[michael123]

do what I said in the last post, windows defender etc. if patching the file is a common thing then read a guide about it to see. another thing is to try to restore a registry backup. cCleaner tries to do these, and if you have allowed it to then you can restore one of them by finding where they are stored. Only do this if you run cCleaner on vista, and make certain that you get the vista and not XP backups. If you use the wrong one...it won't be good. This may help if you edited the registry during your modifications.

[zaid786]

The ccleaner thing is a good idea didnt think of that! Yeh will see what else I can find out about patching tcpip.sys. Thanks alot for your help so far!

[zaid786]

PROBLEM FIXED! The "repair your computer" did the trick! It didn't even get to the "system recovery options" section, it was looking for errors before that. It said your system failed to start, windows is checking your system for errors. It took around 15 minutes to do this. After this it said windows found a problem which was due to a recent driver or software update and it said it was fixed. I restarted my pc and it was fine! It didn't even miss around with the boot loader. Both windows xp and windows vista work now.

[michael123]

Great. Hope you have no more problems, my pleasure to help.