I keep getting the BSOD (Blue screen of death) when starting my pc. Then, on second or third restart, all is well. Suspect the DVD/CD drives or the IDE cables that connect...anyone have any ideas?
Thanks in advance

I had that once, but the bsod stayed on screen for a fraction of a second so couldn't see the message. Do you get a message?

I ended up backing up and wiping and reinstalling windows, drastic!

You could try opening up the box (with the leccy off!) and make sure everything is seated properly....

Could be a hardware issue, with faulty and / or loose components.

As hade says, have a look inside and check everything is tight.

I suspect it may be the memory. Modern OS' don't tolerate faulty RAM chips like they used to...

Could we have more info on the BSOD? It will have some info at the top of the screen

Cables are in all honesty an unlikely cause. Unless you have really old and knackered ones. One easy step is to reinstall windows, good chance that will solve it. thats only an good easy option if your computer has not got loads of stuff on it. If you don't want to do that then you can download some diagnostic s/w. Check out www.goldmemory.cz They have a free memory testing program.
Other option to check if the memory is causing problems is to take one of the dimms out. (assuming you have more than one) try it with each in turn and see if you still get problems.
somewhere to start anyway
Forgot to say boot it in safe mode. (press F8 when first booting and select safemode and see if it works.)

You could try a Repair Install (http://xthost.info/vidster9/HTML/repairinstall.htm) of XP as well. That way you wont lose any infomation on your computer except for Microsoft updates.

Let us know the error code on the BSOD and we might be able to help a bit more :)

if it keeps restarting it could be the windows updates, i did em all and it messed the puter up, suddenly it took 3/5/10 times to boot up and when it did it was fine, i did a repair install of xp for a different reason, lost the updates, reinstalled em and its fine????

Originally posted by Abdul
I suspect it may be the memory. Modern OS' don't tolerate faulty RAM chips like they used to...

I had similar problems, and it was the memory. I'd bought non branded from ebuyer. Got random reboots and BSODs.

Swapped it for Crucial and it's been fine ever since.

I would confirm what others have said, it is most likely your memory that is the problem.

as if it was needed, my experience also says its a good chance that its a memory issue.

I have a similar problem. It started by my LAPTOP only sometimes detecting the dvd rw drive. Now i have to restart the comp 10 - 30 times to get the drive detected without an error.

After the drives detected one in 3 times i get the blue screen and never get chance to read it beofre it restarts the whole system and freezes on the dvd rw detection.

to stop the machine rebooting on error:

start, settings, control panel, system properties
advanced tab
click settings under 'startup and recovery'
untick 'automatically restart' under 'system failure'

...may work.