I've been looking all over the internet, but cannot find help with my problem. I'm not sure I'm posting in the right forum, either. I don't know if my problem is hardware or software related... I suspect hardware...
I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4200 series running windows XP nad it seems to crash after sitting idle for a period of time. The hard drive starts to read really slowly (making a repeditive "tick tick tick" noise) and the system becomes incredibly slow.
After a while it freezes completely. If left for much longer, a blue screen of death appears with something like "KERNEL_STACK_ERROR" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR" (it changes) and it says "Beginning dump of physical memory". Then, after a while, the screen goes to black and I get a single message: "Please insert system disk to continue"
(By the way, I tried inserting a boot disk at this point, but it didn't recognize it)
Once the computer actually restarted and told me "Windows has recovered from a serious error", but as I was not connected to the internet, i could not send the report to microsoft. However I do have the "manifest.txt" and "sysdata.xml" which I believe are related to logging this error, as well some ".dmp" files (which I assume are the "dump of physical memory" files) and I can send them if you want more info.
It's not just while it's idle, either. When it started, I tried a system restore, but when i tried to create a restore point (in case i didn't like the restore) it started reading slowly (with the "click click click" noise).
And it happened today halfway through trying to install Borland c++ builder 6.
I have a theory that the hard drive may have some badly place bad sectors, but when I tried to use the chkdsk utility to find them, it just said "Checking for errors" and then finished without actually doing anything. I know from past experience that these scans take forever.
I hope someone can figure out what it wrong and help me to fix it...
If you need more info, just ask.
Thanks.
