DEALING WITH “STOP” ERROR MESSAGES AT WINDOWS XP SHUTDOWN
02 February 2010
Some users, when attempting either to shutdown or restart Win XP, get windows xp shutdown problem – an error message similar to the following: STOP 0x0000009F: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE
Stop Messages literally means that Windows has stopped. (Which isn’t the same as saying it has shutdown!) See Knowledge Base Links: STOP MESSAGES for much more information that the brief remarks below. Most Stop Messages indicate hardware issues; some are caused by troublesome software or a system service problem. The links page just mentioned provides a 10-step approach to troubleshooting STOP Messages in general, then itemized analysis on the most common of these. (STOP messages are identified by an 8-digit hexadecimal number, but also commonly written in a shorthand notation; e.g., a STOP 0x0000000A may also be written Stop 0xA.)
Here are a few that may affect Win XP shutdown and restart. Stop 0x9F and Stop 0x8E are two of the most common of these at shutdown, and generally point to a bad driver. Stop 0x7B on restarting means Win XP lost access to the system partition or boot volume during the startup process, due to a bad device driver, boot sector virus, resource conflict, boot volume corruption, or other problem listed here. Stop 0xC000021A can when on restart after a system administrator has modified permissions so that the SYSTEM account no longer has adequate permissions to access system files and folders.
MS-MVP Jim Pickering advises the following as one approach to these problems: Restart the computer. Press F8 during the restart and select “ Last Known Good Configuration.” If you catch the problem when it first occurs (meaning you likely have installed only one or two drivers or new service), this will return you to a previous working condition. System Restore provides an alternate approach, especially if you need to go back further than the last known good configuration, and Device Manager provides a tool for rolling back to an earlier driver.