Gateway LT2016u locks up before XP Loading screen.

[Ccomp5950]

This one is new to me.
XP Home, 1gig of ram, netbook.

Upon boot, it locks up before the XP Loading screen even shows up.

Memtest86+, passed with flying colors over 8 passes overnight.
Hard drive is fine (S.M.A.R.T. tests check out, later on I cloned the HD to a brand new HD just because error recovery console gave me)
UBCD4WIN locks up after loading files before XP Loading screen kicks in.
Windows XP Setup CD locks up after loading drivers before it gives you any options.
Knoppix loads fine.
Plop Linux with gnome loads up fine.
WinPE 2.0 (Vista) loads up fine
In Safemode stopped at agpcpq.sys


What I have done beyond the above:
Tried starting with boot logging, no file is written.
Tried Loading in VGA mode, no change.
Tried swapping out AHCI to IDE mode in BIOS
Updated BIOS to latest on Gateway's website (1.24?)
Shutoff loading of agp440.sys and agpcpq.sys for shits and grins
Installed recovery console from WinPE 2.0 using Winnt32 /cmdcons off of an XP CD.
Tried booting off of the recovery console, no dice gives "Disk read error"
ERD Commander doesn't load past "Loading Files"
Cloned the drive to a new drive, no change
tried recovery console install again, no change.

Apparently this is pandemic of the Gateway LT20 family from my google searches.

Has anyone ran into these symptoms and figured it out? I'm thinking the onboard video is fried, but knoppix and plop linux load fine so go figure.

 

[Ccomp5950]

Forgot, after memtest, went ahead and ran part of my antivirus check just out of curiosity.

Antivir report from Plop Linux

Going over the log again, tr/atraps.gen looks a lot worse than I gave it credit for, probably dealing with a half removed virus, going to try and restore the registry from a restore point and see what we get tomorrow.

 

[Ccomp5950]

Rolled back the registry to a month ago, no change. (Was hoping the External CD Drive hookup was wonky so I could disregard the UBCD / ERD not working)

Slaved the hard drive and loaded ERD and ran offline sfc, found a few problems. No change.

Said screw it and ran fdisk in linux to set the restore partition bootable and changed it's system label to NTFS (I overwrote the MBR earlier, so can't just pound ALT+F10). Reimaged the system to factory image. No change.

(Remember this is all off of a cloned HD, I wouldn't do all this on the original).

It's obviously hardware issues I'm having difficulty diagnosing it down further than a motherboard replacement needed. Customer doesn't want to spend a whole lot of money on the computer so it's backing up data and pricing him out a new laptop.

 

[CLC]

Have you tried setting the hard drive mode in the bios to compatible or ide? Not sure why, but I have had some netbooks give blue screens after running an xp install cd. It will go through all the motions, and when you are supposed to see more options and select hard drive etc, blue screen. Set the mode to ide and it worked. Also seen this problem with the ubcdforwin locking up with out the mode set to ide.
http://forums.vr-zone.com/troublesh...ta-ide-compatibility-mode-ahci-windows-4.html

 

[Ccomp5950]

If I remember correctly yes, I did. No change.

 

[glricht]

Definitely weird. Since you've checked almost all the HW, my guess is a bad CPU (or maybe MB) that raises its head when switching from real mode to virtual mode. Got a spare CPU/MB you can try?

 

[Ccomp5950]

The computer is no longer in my shop. We recovered data and his insurance replaced the computer at no cost to him (minus data recovery on my part)