I'm posting here because of a nasty problem I came across with my primary comp, using win xp pro sp 2. First off, I used BC Wipe to wipe the free space on my hd to improve it's performance a bit as it had been a bit sluggish. Well, it finished (although it did show one alert of low disk space which I thought was a misinformed feature caused by the free space wiping and it showed 129gigs of free space after wipe anyway) and then I shut down the pc and got the following error: *** STOP: 0x0000007E (0x0000005, 0xF705C184, 0xF7AB203C, 0xF7AB2A38). As it was about software apparently I booted up in safe mode with networking and backuped my files just in case (System restore was disabled so I had no point to go back) and used MSConfig to drop out the system startup programs (eg. Norton antivirus) to see if that was the problem. Nope, it wasn't so I booted back to safe mode and put the programs back on from MSConfig and shut down to continue later ( I had disk check scheduled at the start as well). When I tried to put it on again, I got the following error: A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer. If this is the the first time you've seen this error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps: Disable or uninstall any any anti-virus, disk defragmentation or backup utilities. Check your hard drive for configuration, and check for any updated drivers. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer. Technical information: *** STOP: 0x00000024 (0x00190203, 0x86EB3868, 0x0000102, 0x00000000). And this error comes when I try any mode at all, normal, last good known config, all 3 variations of safe mode, etc. The only thing that I can access with that pc now is setup at start up.

That's what happened before.

Did this:
CHKDSK C: /P /R. Results:
CHKDSK is checking the volume...
CHKDSK is performing additional checking or recovery...
CHKDSK is performing additional checking or recovery...
CHKDSK is performing additional checking or recovery...
CHKDSK has finished checking the volume
156280288 kilobytes of total disk space
135015972 kilobytes are available
4096 bytes in each allocation unit
39070072 total allocation units on disk
33753993 allocation units available on disk

And tried this one:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/helpandsupport/learnm...oug92.mspx

Got:
The setup was repairing xp untill it got to installing devices, approx. 34 mins left as it said. The following came up: A message about my graphics card not being verified by windows logo testing bla bla.. that's normal, happens every time I repair or install windows xp, but now my mouse and keyboard went dead, no working at all (both are USB and mouse is wireless), tried switching ports and that didn't help, so there was no way to click ok to continue with the geforce installation, which prevents the whole repair from advancing. Tried rebooting the machine and every time it brings repair back and on 34 mins left gives me the same problem. Now it doesn't even give me chance to try the different boot mode e.g. safe mode.

What to do?

Thank you in advance,
Tom R.

It's obvious that the Wipe Free Space software corrupted your hard drive. I used a similar software before, which is OK for the many times I used it on different comps, but one time it killed my Win2k system. I got the same STOP error blue screen. There's nothing you can do, but take the HDD to a different comp to grab all important data and then reinstall Windows -- I mean a complete reformat and installation, not repair.

I don't know the exact mechanism of how wiping free space (supposingly safe) corrupting the existing hard drive data. But there's always a risk to do low level formatting (wiping) in a partition with live data! Especially if a defrag was done also prior or after the wiping, which is what occurred to my Win2k sys.

Ok, I'll let you know how it turned out, but how do I solve the problem with mouse & KB freezing? I think they are viable to do that in full installation as well as they did in repair. Both are USB... should I just get PS/2 from somewhere?