BSOD galore!

[RyuuKi]

Hey folks

I'm officially at the end of my patience and things are going to get broken soon.

I've had BSODs occur a lot on my current system, some were one offs, some were hardware faults that have been fixed. But the one I keep getting at the moment is driving me insane.

I keep getting different BSODs. But what's most confusing about these BSODs is that it happens during boot up of Windows after the PC has been off for several hours. I can go ahead and reboot as much as I like but i won't happen every time, it will only BSOD me with a different code every time when I start the PC up for the first time of the day or if the PC has been off for a few hours. It will not crash during use. Even after 9 hours of solid use I don't so much as have a program crash or freeze (yeah i minor miracle eh?), and definitely no BSOD crashes during use. Only when I start up for the first time.

One that keeps me scratching my head involves ATAPI.SYS. Which I believe relates to DVD drives and virtual dvd drives from DAemon Tools etc. DT, Alcohol have been uninstalled yet it still happens only with a different code!

This time it relates to the whole IRQ less or not equal to error which points to a faulty driver install. I thought it might be due to my graphics card and I think I may be more accurate than I thought. I previously ran a BFG 8800GTX while i was getting these blue screens. I just had it exchanged for a GTX280 and last night before it arrived I removed my old 8800, removed the nvidia drivers, booted in safemode and used Driver Cleaner to wipe all nvidia drivers clean. This morning after I recieved my 280 I installed it and started the PC. At this point there were no display drivers installed and the PC had been off for about 9 hours. It's pretty much guaranteed to BSOD me at this time, however it didn't. IT booted straight into windows. I installed the latest nvidia driver. rebooted. BSOD! SO *** IS GOING ON!?? I don't believe that the card is actually faulty at al, nor do I believe my previous card was as it works fine in other machines.

I have a feeling this problem is related to my motherboard. I'm testing it without the DVD drive plugged in just to make sure it's not that as otherwise i'm out of ideas. I've tested both hard drives, i've had MemTest running for 6 hours, I've had Prime95 run for 24 hours with no problems.

My specs are:

Intel E8400 Dual Core 3.0ghz
ABIT Ip 35 Pro XE
BFG GeForce GTX280 1gb
500 GB Western Digital 16mb cache
320 GB WEstern Digital 16mb cache
Pioneer 215DBK DL DVD-RW
700Watt OCZ Power Supply

Windows XP Pro 64bit SP3

If anyone can give me any clue as to what else could be wrong I'm all ears and very thankful. I will be attempting a reformat and clean reinstall of Windows if trying to start without the DVD drive plugged in doesn't work.

Thanks

[Briton]

Can you provide STOP codes? That would help tremendously.

If you can't get them off the screen, locate the .dmp file and use the Microsoft debugging tool from here: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtoo...g/default.mspx to read the files.

[rjs735]

I agree with Briton.

Wass there ever a time when the system was stable. Is this relatively new build. By your component list your pretty much pushing the evelope.

What were you doing when you got these bsods. What apps or games were you running?

[RyuuKi]

I'm in the process of formatting at the moment to see whether or not that will help. If it continues afterwards I will post the BSOD codes here.

I did try using the debugger to read the dumps earlier on but all I got was endless amounts of "missing symbol" or similar type messages filling the file so it was pretty much useless.

As for how they started, I have no idea. I've eternally had BSOD errors on this system since about a year ago. However, since then more or less the entire system with the exception of backup hard drive (the 320gb), Power supply, and case have been replaced. The graphics card has been replaced today with no improvement. So those pieces of hardware are the only constants. I guess it's possible the back up hard drive might be the culprit though.

Ill get the codes and post them if it continues to BSOD on me. However the computer has to be off for about 2 or 3 hours before it's guaranteed to BSOD.

Thanks for the response folks

[Briton]

Even with the debugger you have to do a bit of searching, but there will be a STOP code located in there somewhere.

[RyuuKi]

Well i just finished reinstalling windows and all was fine up until I installed Internet Explorer 7 and had to reboot. It BSODed me and rebooted while Windows was starting up. I hadn't had chance to turn off the auto reboot option so wasn't able to catch the code.

I did however get the dump opened in the debugger which still didn't make much sense. I've atached the dump file to this post in a rar file (it's scanned clean with Nod32). If anyone can make any sense of it I would greatly appreciate it. It did however mention the file ntoskrnl.exe but i'm not too sure what that relates to?

[Briton]

Are you running any sort of firewall software beyond the Windows provided one? (Side note question)

It's a 0x00000050 error so that leads me to believe it could very possibly be a hard drive issue.

You're positive both drives passed the extended versions of the MFG-issued diagnostic tests? You said it could possibly be an old back up drive...was this one tested?

[RyuuKi]

Yeah both were tested with the smart and extended tests of WEstern Digital's diagnostic software. The reason I believe it might be my back up hard drive rather than the main one is because the main one was recently replaced as it developed a bad sector and I still suffered from BSODs before then. I've not had a BSOD yet but the computer hasn't been turned off for an extended period of time. I've taken everything except the motherboard, CPU and PSU out and reinstalled everything making sure all connections are right and I've not experience a BSOD yet.

I won't be able to test anything out until tomorrow though as I need to leave it standing and do a cold start to see whether the BSOD will pop up again.

Thanks for taking a look at that mate, I really appreciate it. Hopefully it will have been a bad connection or something.

On a side note, I'm running Comodo Pro firewall. I've got that running on all my systems and I've not had a problem with it so far. Would it be possible that it's that causing the problem?

[Briton]

If you haven't BSOD'd since you reinstalled the operating system I have a hunch that it might not happen again. Everything I found with that error/bug code was software related, so I'd imagine a reinstall would fix the issue.

I heard of firewall softwares causing a few of those error codes (they were Zone Alarm related, though) so I figured I'd ask.

[RyuuKi]

I seem to be fine so far Left the PC overnight and just started it up fully expecting a BSOD upon start up as it normally does. But no BSOD! Not sure whether it was the reinstall or the reconnection of everything that helped, may even have been a mix of both.

Either way it SEEMS fixed. So thanks a lot for the help dude, it's been very helpful