Blue Screen 0x0000007A

I have a 3 years old laptop and recently I am getting too many blue screen of death errors that is referring to the atapi.sys file. After this error, I was getting the hard drive error saying that the device could not be found. So, I went on to do a System Restore and after that the BSOD error stopped for a while. But again they came back, and therefore I cannot guess that it could be a problem with the hard drive or either the RAM that is going bad? Below is the information of BSOD:

kernel_data_inpage_error

STOP: 0x0000007A (0xC07C1640, 0XC000000E, 0XF82C8130, 0X198B0860)

atapi.sys

Address F82C8130 base at F82B7000, Datastamp 41107b4d

Can anyone please help? Thanks

You can check out the stop error codes in this thread - http://forums.techarena.in/guides-tutorials/1286778.htm

In any case, have you tried to back up your data because if a reinstallation of the Operating System is required then you will lose all the data from the drive. For installation of OS, did you burn the set of recovery cd/dvd as given in the laptop manual? If you dont have recovery CDs then it will not be possible to reinstall the operating system provided with your laptop. There should be a recovery partition in the laptop drive but if the drive fails then the partition will be also gone. In that case you will have to purchase a legal copy of Windows XP from the microsoft site to reinstall the operating system.

You can use check disk command for any errors on hard disk by following the below commands:

1. First of all click Start.
2. After that in the Run box type 'cmd' and ENTER. Right click and select 'Run as administrator'.
3. After that type at the command prompt CHKDSK /P and press ENTER to scan the disk.
4. And later you can type CHKDSK C: /F /R and press ENTER to repair corrupt sectors, if there are any.

You can also download HD Tune which is a kind of discrete software and that uses SMART functions integrated into all disks to inform us about the state of the health of a hard drive. It is also capable of real-time monitoring the temperature of each hard drive and it includes a module to measure performance which is quite convincing. A tool similar to Windows "Scandisk" is also part in it and when it does any repairs, it is relatively fast even on large capacity drives.