Hey guys a while back I was having a problem with my computer where it kept restarting everytime I tried to use the internet and I assumed it was some sort of malware. Anyway I tried to get rid of it with the help of GodFoot and after many attempts and no luck we decided I should just backup my drive and do a clean install. Well here's where the problem comes into play, you see I have a seagate 120gb harddrive and I have this program that I got with my first computer way back in 1999 when I was still a noob and purchased a gateway. Well that program is a system restoration disk but it also functions like the program called wipe drive which allows you to write zeros to the hardrive and completely erase it instead of doing a halfass erase like you do when you erase the harddrive using the windows xp install disk.

Well the program successfully wrote zeros to the drive and I also ran a test to check if the drive was defective and after the test ran it said the drive was fine. The only reason I'm mentioning this is because after that I went ahead and started installing Win XP Pro. It went fine through the process of creating a partion then it formated the drive as NTFS I didn't use the quick format I always do the long format.

Then it copied all the neccessary files. So now we're at the point when the system reboots and goes to the setup screen where it actually installs windows and asks you to set the time zone and time and everything else. The problem with my computer is that after the system reboots it doesn't enter the setup to continue installation it just gives me a blue screen telling me that an error occurrred and that in order to prevent damage to my system that I should reboot or shut down.

The error I get is
BAD_POOL_CALLER
*** STOP 0x000000c2(0x00000007, 0x00000cd4, 0x00000000, 0x81BA28A0)
and I did some research on it, but I can't exactly pin point what it accually means. I'm thinking there is something wrong with my memory because microsoft's site mentions something about allocating memory issues.

I've already tested my PSU and it's working fine. I tested my ribbon cables for the harddrive and cd rw drive connected to the system and that's fine. I've also reseated the memory and the cpu and I used artic silver thermal paste for the cpu to make sure there weren't any heat issues. this is my brother's computer and he bought it off the internet at a place called OC systems so I didn't know if they used some crappy cheap thermal paste like most system vendors do so I decided just to reseat the CPU just to be sure it wasn't a heat realated issue.

Just to let you know before I forget even though this system was purchased, in the time that my brother has owned it the only hardware that remains original that came with the system is the motherboard which is an FB51 intel shuttle board v1.3, the graphics card which is a Radeon 9500 Pro 128mb, and that's about all of the original hardware. The harware I replaced was a no name dvd rom drive with a memorex CDRW 52x32x52, an 80gb western digital drive with a 120gb Seagate drive both are PATA drives, and I also replaced the PSU which originally was a 200W Shuttle PSU and I repalced it with a 250W shuttle PSU which was the highest wattage I could find that was still compatable to fit inside my small Shuttle SB51g case and it's also enough to power everything in the system without putting stress on the PSU.

The program that I mentioned earlier that I said I used to write zero's to the drive was given to me by gateway computers when I bought my first PC with them, as I mentioned before. What I didn't mention was that the computer I purchased from them also had a western digital HDD and when I finished erasing the Seagate drive with this program I tried to perform another test that I can't recall, but what is important is that when I tried to run that particular test it told me I couldn't because the HDD was not a Western Digital Drive. My question is when you use these types of programs that write zero's to your HDD does it really matter what type of HDD it is you are erasing and are these programs ever written to work on only specific drives.

I ask because I've seen other programs that do the same thing as the program I'm using. For example wipe drive which is a utility program sold in all computer stores does the exact same thing as my program it writes zero's to the HDD in order to completely erase it so it's like new again like when you first bought it. I also ask because I figure if it would have been an incompatability problem to use this program on a seagate drive when it was intended to be used on Western Digital drives, and if that were the case then when I ran that test to check if the drive was defective it would have mentioned something but instead it said the drive was in perfect working condition.

After a lot of testing I decided to remove the graphics card to see if there was something wrong there, but after I rebooted the machine just using the onboard graphics it still did the same thing. Keep in mind that the blue screen only stayed up the longest allowing me to read the error message once and then from then on it would just briefly flash the blue screen and just reboot. I checked my temps in the bios and it's not a heat realated issue because all the temps are in the 30 - 36 celsius degree range.

After the machine still rebooted without the Radeon card I decided to disconnect the CDRW drive and then it still rebooted. Then it was just the HDD left plugged in and the machine still rebooted. Finally, I diconnected the HDD and just let the system boot without anything connected the only things that were plugged in where naturally the processor, the memory, and the PSU. SInce the PSU was Good and the CPU was good I started to think that the memory was the culprit becuase obviously the system is not going to reboot if nothing is being loaded into the memory because when I booted the machine with nothing but the essentials plugged in to power it up it just stayed on past the post because there was nothing to load since the HDD was not connected.

Unfortunately I don't have another stick of ram of pc2700 to test my theory but I figured if you guys could let me know if I was right on my guess because of what I found out when I researched
BAD_POOL_CALLER
*** STOP 0x000000c2(0x00000007, 0x00000cd4, 0x00000000, 0x81BA28A0)

I will go out and buy some new memory for my system and fix this annoying problem. Thank you for any help that you can provide.

Bad Pool Caller sounds like a memory problem. There is a program you can run called memtest86. It will test your memory. All you need is a floppy drive and disk or a CD Writer and CD-R.

http://www.memtest86.com/

by any chance is your internet connection hooked up usb or any devices hooked up to usb, i work doing tech support for microsoft and its pretty common to see that error related to usb devices, especially any wireless usb like netgear and such, also try going into safe mode, if you can get in there go to start run and services.msc and disable the indexing service and if you have a wireless connection disable the wireless zero configuration service