Blue screen of death

[camioneur]

I was asked last week to look at afriends pc that has developed this "blue screen of death" I looked all over but can't get past it. It won't boot from a disk and I so i said I couldn't help. This week, another with the same syptoms exactly from another friend. Both these pc's are predominantly used by school kids and MSN. Is there a link, could a virus or similar cause this and how do you get past this when loading in safe mode does exactly the same. I just can't get past the blue screen no matter what I do!

[isj032]

Hi Camioneur!.. What does that name mean? lol
I'd suggest replacing the hard drives, or removing them and then using another computer with anti virus to scan them. Maybe they won't need to be replaced but i would certainly add/update the anti virus software on those computers because a virus is the likely culprit. However It could also be the hardware configuration, can you get into the bios? When is the blue screen kicking in? At windows startup or before bios? Assuming that you can get into the bios, try changing the settings back to the defaults. If it is a virus and you can remove it then i would recommend re-installing the operating system too.

[zigzag]

before you mess with the bios,check your cpu fan
make sure it isn't clogged with dust

[camioneur]

the blue screen is coming up just after the XP Home screen, I can get into Bios but it won't load from CD, well not my wundows XP CD anyway, is that right? Do I need a special boot disk or should it load from windows CD if I alter the boot order to load CD first?

the message at the top of the blue screen is UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME

the first message at the bottom is "floppy disk not found", but that's not on the list of drives to load from anyway and it hasn't got one!

isj032, the name is nothing special i'm afraid, merely french for trucker