BSOD before desktop, fresh install (c000021a)

[EvoStorm]

Now here's a fun one. A family member of mine's got one of my old computers for personal use, but recently the thing's been acting up, giving a lovely blue screen with a very short message related to a critical process not able to load, therefore force stopping the boot. ("The initial session process or system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x00000000")

I have done a fresh install at least 3 times, both Windows 7 and Windows 8. All of these installs worked absolutely fine, and everything ran smoothly. But as soon as the system restarts, the BSOD happens (though the latest attempt with Windows 7 had it restarting just fine, except for the morning after, when it happened again). System Restore becomes useless as well, either that or Drive Protection is disabled by default.

Now this could really be anything, but I'm guessing this to be a hardware issue, possibly the (old) HDD. I really just want an opinion on this, and what you guys think the best first step would be. Replacing the HDD would be my cheapest solution, but if you think the RAM for example could also cause this particular issue to happen, I'd love to hear it.

Regards,
Evo

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there EvoStorm,

It is possible that this is caused by your HDD.
You can start with something simple as just changing the cables(both SATA and power one). You can attach the drive to a different SATA port as well.
If the issue persists, then you can just test your HDD and RAM.

You can test your HDD with a brand specific(or a third party one) HDD testing tool for DOS. In case the results show that there is something wrong with the HDD, then I guess you will need to get another one.

How many RAM stick do you have installed on your system? In case it is more than one, you can try running the computer with only one RAM stick at a time(you can change the slot as well).

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[EvoStorm]

Hi there EvoStorm,

It is possible that this is caused by your HDD.
You can start with something simple as just changing the cables(both SATA and power one). You can attach the drive to a different SATA port as well.
If the issue persists, then you can just test your HDD and RAM.

You can test your HDD with a brand specific(or a third party one) HDD testing tool for DOS. In case the results show that there is something wrong with the HDD, then I guess you will need to get another one.

How many RAM stick do you have installed on your system? In case it is more than one, you can try running the computer with only one RAM stick at a time(you can change the slot as well).

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

Thanks for the reply =)

I don't think it's a cable issue, but it never hurts to try. The hard drive has been performing rather poorly lately, with slow speeds and hiccups, so I'm going to try and replace it with a test drive first to see if that solves anything. I'll also try pulling out a RAM stick, as I believe the system has 2 (I'm currently not at home).

To be fair, it's a very old 80GB HDD (and I think it has both SATA and IDE connectivity), so replacing it wouldn't be a bad idea in general.