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Originally Posted by vivek16
Err, I can't find PnP in my Bios. I do have a dell laptop. Do laptops use a skimpier versions of BIOS than desktops?
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That's not surprising: many major PC manufacturers use custom BIOS interfaces with few options. I was hoping for something like an Award, AMI or Phoenix BIOS. Then again, if you can't change it, chances are it's not set wrongly to begin with, and isn't the source of the PnP-related bluescreen.
Quote:
Originally Posted by vivek16
Ok, I noticed when I try to boot it in safe mode, the screen stops at a certain file name (it ends in driver/mup ). Is there a way to delete that certain driver with bios or ubuntu?
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First, what filesystem is on the drive? FAT32 or NTFS? If it's a FAT32 drive, then Ubuntu will natively support reading and writing it, so you could boot Ubuntu and rename that file to something else. If it's NTFS, there are Linux drivers capable of writing to an NTFS partition, but as I recall, many aren't free, and others are very much beta software. You could try loading one of those up, and doing the same, but I wouldn't recommend that.
If you'd like to do this through Windows, there's an interface called Recovery Console, accessible from the Windows F8 boot menu (either when you boot from the hard drive, or from a Windows XP CD). The interface is DOS-like, but not quite the same. (I believe typing "help" will give a command list.) To access it, you'll need to supply the password of the local Administrator account, as they existed when (and if) Recovery Console was installed (I'm not sure if it's a default option on XP; I suspect not). If it's not installed locally you could try installing it from the boot CD or bootable floppy set, but I'm not so sure that this will work without a functioning copy of Windows (it's also installable via the Windows Add/Remove Programs dialog, which is conveniently inaccessible).
If you can get in via Recovery Console, you'll be able to get file system access with administrative privileges, and rename the offending file so it will be overlooked on startup. Once it's disabled, then you'll be able to boot Windows up—it will throw an error that a service or driver failed on startup (because you killed it)—and use the one of the registry editors (regedit.exe or reged32.exe) to remove the references to the driver in order to keep it from starting.
I've tried this on Windows 2000, and it works excellently. (I was removing a parallel-IDE bridge driver that I'd installed, and which ended up not working—I think it was a mislabelled Windows 98-era driver, rather than an NT-compatible one.)
Now that I think of it, however, there's an even better solution to removing the driver once you've renamed its file: use
Microsoft Sysinternals' Autoruns to deselect or delete the offending driver from the list (on the Drivers tab). This will painlessly make the same registry change that I referred to above.
There is one big caveat here: first and foremost, don't do this unless you're absolutely sure that it's the right file, and that Windows will boot when it's not present.
As an alternative, you could also try performing a repair installation. This is also accessed from the computer's Windows F8 boot menu (either local or from a bootable CD). This will roll back the Windows installation to the version contained on a CD, while (hopefully) leaving program configurations and data intact. If you go this route, it will require reinstallation of service packs and patches to bring it back up to date, and you'll lose tons of (mostly trivial) configurations. If the driver was a third-party file (search for its name on the Internet to figure out who makes it), the repair installation will delete the registry reference to it, and it will cease to run on startup. If it's a Windows driver that's become corrupted, it will replace it with a good copy. But if there's some conflict between the correct version of the Windows driver and either some hardware or other driver, this will not necessarily solve the problem. (That last case seems unlikely, given the symptoms you've described, however.)
Aside: I'm seeing that all of the posts in this thread have occurred at HH:09, instead of the actual post time. Looks like there's a vBulletin bug...Brandon will be summoned.