Referenced memory error

[pbbaltay]

Hello,

Our HP Pavillion ze 4800 laptop (XP Home, AMD processor) will not start up, even in Safe mode.

Upon startup we get an winlogon.exe application error message that instruction at 0x77f56cde referenced memory at 0x002e5b54, which cannot be read. The machine goes into a continuous re-boot loop.

I've reinstalled Windows XP home, to no avail.

I've tried removing one of the two RAM chips, and switching their poitions, to no avail.

How can I get the machine started, just enough to save the hard drive contens? Will I need to completely reformat the drive?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

-peter

[jaclaz]

Best option in my view is to first salvage data, this can easily be made with an adpter cable from 2,5" to 3,5" hd, mounting the drive in any other desktop PC, something like this:

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_getprod...asterid=811539/

or, given the now lowering costs of external USB boxes, something like this:

http://www.pricegrabber.com/search_attrib.php/page_id=351

Only once data is safe one can think of satrting repair or reformatting.

jaclaz

[cluberti]

If winlogon is continually crashing, does the error occur in safe mode? It sounds as if something 3rd party has loaded in the winlogon process, and is causing it to crash - a winlogon crash will bugcheck or reboot the box (depending on the crash source and whether the error handler can handle the error internally or not).

If you can get into safe mode w/networking, you should be able to run msconfig to disable all non-Microsoft startup and service items, but you should also be able to download autoruns (from sysinternals) and shellexview (from nirsoft.net) to further disable all non-Microsoft items - startup items, services, *winlogon providers*, explorer shell hooks, etc. This may get you back into Windows without the hassle of data backup or restore installation options.