General Question

Haroot's avatar

Is there anything I can do to save my blue-screening computer?

Asked by Haroot (2123points) August 26th, 2011

I have a Dell 380 Precision running XP 64. It will randomly blue screen or just shut down on me.

The blue screen reads “DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL” and further down is see “a320raid.sys.”

Anything I can do or should I just reformat already?

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6 Answers

blueiiznh's avatar

This usually indicates a bad hard drive. I have run your BSOD error through a few KB including Microsoft and most were resolved by replacing a failing hard drive.

Copy your important files off to an external USB drive for backup.

Kade13's avatar

If you would like to save the data you have on there, you may want to consider purchasing a caddy for the hard drive and then you can simply connect it to another computer via USB and copy over your files.

After that go ahead and reformat, last time i had this happen it was due to a failing hard drive which burned out on me a few weeks later so you may want to replace it with a new one.

XOIIO's avatar

USe the parted magic boot cd to copy your stuff over to an external, this is better than safe mode because the hard drive isnt running everything, then get a new hard drive.

HungryGuy's avatar

Save your files and reinstall XP from scratch.

Or better yet, replace XP with Linux…

blueiiznh's avatar

@hungryguy what OS is running has nothing to do with a failing hard drive. Reinstalling the OS from scratch is a bit more timeconsuming and overkill that simply chkdsk and marking the spot as bad. If the drive is starting to exhibit an increase in bad spots, then it really is the sign to get a new drive. That is when the new OS can be laid down.

ApolloX64's avatar

I would say it’s not as likely to be a drive as it is to be a bad driver. Considering it references “a320raid.sys” as the source of the problem, it’s telling you that it’s attempting to load that particular file and failing. Most likely cause is a corrupt windows install. Considering this is a month old I’ll assume you’ve fixed the issue one way or another.
But for future reference; when it says “driver_irq….” it’s usually pointing to a piece of software that failed to load for any number of reasons.

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