BSOD shenanigans...

[bobtheskull]

God damn pissed off!

Two nights ago
Switching off for the night, got a completely random BSOD. Decided to deal with it the next day.

Yesterday morning
the wife was on the computer for about 2 hours without problems. I switched over to my account and.... BSOD! ****. Went on to google to research the possible reasons using the crash report. Got about 20 mins the.... BSOD. **** ****! It rebooted and from that point on Chrome refused to work. Ok, getting a little irritated...

Hopped to Firefox, sat for another 10 mins and hahahaBSOD!! ************!! Quit all browsers, disabled all non-essential progs and ran my AV. All clear. Ran anti malware, all clear but, hey, how about another BSOD. FUUUU.... Ok, you get the idea....

Throughout the day, running various things to try and work out where the error was, I must have had about 12 BSOD before I gave up and went back to bed.

This morning
BSOD within 5 minutes of booting up. Instantly followed by a 'Your Windows is not genuine' message.

Now, I know that a good portion of BSOD crashes are RAM related. And from the seemingly random crashes I've had, that would back it up. But my RAM is only 2 months old, and has been working perfectly since installed.

Since I have no money to get more, I decided to do a long needed reinstall on a clean drive instead. I've spent the best part of the day doing this (its now 8pm) and so far, it seems to be running fairly stable. Could it have just been ages of clogged drivers and installations? Nothing, other than Dead Island, had been installed on my rig for a few weeks. Apart from a chrome and adobe flash update.

 

[Vegeta897]

Most of the time BSoDs are caused by drivers, and since it was only happening on your account, that seems the most likely culprit.

 

[bobtheskull]

I'm hoping that's the case. Seems fairly stable. It was just weird how the computer crashed at completely random points. Even sat idle with nothing running, while I was doing something else. Thats what made me think possibly RAM.

 

[sixteenth]

That "Your Windows is not genuine" notification is odd. That popping up out of nowhere, I would think, has nothing to do with your drivers/RAM. Unless, you had a system update that screwed up a driver and invalidated your Windows key. Perhaps a power-cycle in the middle of Windows updating?

Crashing at random points leads me to think overheating, but I have bad history of computers with cooling issues, so yea.

 

[bobtheskull]

My cooling is actually reasonably good to be honest. Not had any problems overheating before.

Now that you mention it, I do recall having a windows update a few days ago, but as it was as I was heading to bed I didn't really take any notice of it. That is a possibility too. The reinstall, using the same copy of windows, is working fine with no issues as of yet.

 

[Krynn72]

Most of the time BSoDs are caused by drivers, and since it was only happening on your account, that seems the most likely culprit.

Different drivers aren't loaded for different user accounts I don't think. And usually driver BSODs happen at startup, and happen reliably.

The top causes of BSODs in my experience have been
1) Issue with hard drive (usually 1+ bad sectors somewhere on the drive). This is far and away the most common one, especially if its happening at seemingly random times or while windows is starting.
2) Viruses. We've gotten more than a few computers that had viruses that resulted in similar issues, BSOD and even the non-genuine issue. If you were running antivirus programs that were installed prior to the issue occurring then thats not a good indicator, as they can become corrupt fairly easily.
3) Drivers
4) Some other software
5) Ram.

Ram doesn't usually go bad, far less common than any of the other issues. However, if you have time and want to be sure your hardware is ok, then get a Hiren's disk, boot to it, and run MHDD and memtest86+. If you get any UNC (uncorrectable) sectors showing up on the hard drive with MHDD then thats probably the problem, and if it isn't, then it will be very soon. They can be marked though. If you get any other errors (IDNF, AMNF, etc) then replace the drive asap, because those can't really be marked I've found, and will cause big time problems.

And obviously if memtest86+ finds any errors, its simply a matter of narrowing down which ram chip is faulty, and removing/replacing it.


I would personally recommend running MHDD at least though, because if you do have a bad sector somewhere, say in the middle of the drive or something, your files may not be on it yet, and windows may not need to access it yet, which would be why its working now. But as soon as windows tries to write or access that sector, its BSOD time again.

 

[bobtheskull]

I would personally recommend running MHDD at least though, because if you do have a bad sector somewhere, say in the middle of the drive or something, your files may not be on it yet, and windows may not need to access it yet, which would be why its working now. But as soon as windows tries to write or access that sector, its BSOD time again.

Thanks Krynn, I'll try that now.

Maybe its my ignorance on such matters, but I always assumed if it were the HDD it'd have at least 'sounded' different. Anyways, the Primary drive is a 1Tb drive (I'm currently set up on a 500Gb til I can work out what happened), and it was about 650Gb full until a day before the crashes. I Installed Homefront, then Dead Island (about 20Gb total) And things went tits up!

I'll report back if I find anything.

 

[bobtheskull]

Well, that was interesting. Memtest showed almost 30,000 errors! Tested both sticks separately and, surprise surprise, stick 2 was completely fragged. At least I can still run on one stick til I can afford to get a replacement (yes, that is how broke I am right now).

Just mentioned this to a friend and he just reminded me that we had a lot of power spikes throughout the day on Friday. I'm wondering if that's the culprit

 

[Krynn72]

Well, that was interesting. Memtest showed almost 30,000 errors! Tested both sticks separately and, surprise surprise, stick 2 was completely fragged. At least I can still run on one stick til I can afford to get a replacement (yes, that is how broke I am right now).

Just mentioned this to a friend and he just reminded me that we had a lot of power spikes throughout the day on Friday. I'm wondering if that's the culprit

Power spikes can cause all sorts of damage, usually the power supply can absorb it though. Glad you found the issue though, because I know how frustrating it can be to think you fixed something, only to have it happen again after a little while. As for the 30k errors, its not that there's 30k things wrong with the memory, as much as every attempt to read/write to the memory has failed. Memtest just keeps on trying even if the first couple tests fail. Usually as soon as I see red I just stop the test and figure out which one is bad. I don't let it finish if I see any error at all, and just move on to the next step. Sometimes its just static electricity build up in the ram, or sometimes its not fully seated in the slot. But if you took it out and put it back in then they solves both of those issues usually.

And for the HDD, a bad sector isn't really going to make it sound any different. The only time the HDD makes sound is either its just old and uses old tech, had physical components about to fail, or has physical components that have already failed.

 

[bobtheskull]

sometimes its not fully seated in the slot

Yeah, nearly gave myself a heart attack when I thought I'd killed it completely when testing them separately and the computer wouldn't even stay on long enough for the BIOS to boot! Realised the stick hadn't been pushed fully into place. Doh!

Anyway, thanks Krynn. And pointing me to that disk (that'll be getting kept somewhere safe!). Don't know why I didn't run memtest in the first instance, but hey... I never do anything normal. The system is running absolutely perfect after I whipped out the bad stick. Still had the Windows problem so currently doing a reinstall, and using it as an excuse to do a much needed, long overdue clear out.

 

[Krynn72]

Glad to hear its working good. That'll be $29+tax.