As the title suggests, I now get a BSoD when I hibernate. Two days ago my Zone Alarm went crazy with new connections, asking me to approve/deny them, etc, and before I could even deal with it I had a BSoD on my hands. Some sort of mem usage error (I unfortunately didn't write it down). Since then, every time I attempt to hibernate my laptop, I am treated with a BSoD.
I fiddled around for a while, tried to run a chkdsk (it found errors, but won't remove them until I'm not accessing files on the hard drive, read on to see why that can't seem to happen), and then tried to start up in safe mode. This produced a different BSoD, and it only stays on screen for about a second (video and image below). Since I can't get into Safe Mode, I can't seem to get a chkdsk repair to work.
These are the images from the hibernation-caused BSoD:
This is the image of the safe-mode caused BSoD:
This is the video of the Safe Mode BSoD being caused. The same seried of events also occurs when I try the Safe Mode with command prompt option.
I can't seem to find anything about it, and I'm looking for a bit of guidance. I use hibernate as a way to temporarily store audacity project files without eating disk space so that I can run between classes before I export my lecture audio, which takes 15 or so minutes, and the function is generally helpful.
As you can tell by the video (and the images), I'm on an Alienware, more specifically a 2008 Alienware m15x laptop with Windows XP SP3 installed. If needed, I can provide other technical information.
II would lean towards a disk issue since it's throwing weird bsod's in safe mode too. I think my first steps would be to get out your XP install CD and try getting to the recovery console. If it bsod's there, then it probably isn't the hard drive (could still be the drive controller). If it doesn't bsod there, we can try doing the check disk from there, maybe deleting the hiberfil (you'll lose your last hibernate), and checking the disk.
If it bsod's even when trying to get to the recovery console, I think I'd goto running other diagnostics, maybe memtest86 to start with.
If you have a second machine and are comfortable popping the hard drive, you may want to do that to get any data off of it. (lotsa good detailed info in the post, thanks!)
I actually have a recent backup of everything on this one on my EHD, so the data isn't an issue. I tried to unseat the HDD and re-seat it, but it's screwed in there like mad, to the point that I think I'd need a drill to unscrew it.
I assume I've already lost my last hibernate, as booting normally works fine, it just doesn't restore my attempted hibernate, which I'm assuming got fucked up around BSoD time.
I'm not entire sure I've got an install CD, as Alienware pre-installs the software and attaches a verification code to the bottom of the laptop. I'll look for the install CD though, in hopes that I have it.
If you have any other sort of boot CD (Ubuntu, other Linux, etc), you could try just deleting the hiberfil.sys file using the LiveCD, then see if you can create a new Hibernation file in XP.
Viruses can also cause blue screens in safe mode, which may be the case if Zone Alarm was yelling at you up until that point. I'd first double check to make sure everything's backed up, in case it's a hardware issue. Then I'd see if you can run the free version of Malwarebytes and see what happens.
I just spent 2 days removing malware from a system exhibiting the same issues. The quickest, easiest solution would be to do a reinstall of windows from recovery media/partition, or just go back to your most recent backup from before the problems appeared.
