ezekiel3

thanks. Dell now thinks its the memory. Which I guess coud make sense in terms of the crashing and the inability to dump the memory, although, the memory was not changed when they swaped the motherboard. I guess maybe it was damaged somehow it the change or it is just not sitting right in the new motherboard. I will say we swapped the 2 current memory chips that are in there now and I ran it for a day that way and the crash was a kernel inpage error insteda of process terminated. I have 2 new memory chips in route from dell right now, once I get those in maybe everything goes away. I still wonder whats up with the hard drive is locked bit... Maybe that will just happen post any crash. Maybe I can force feed a different blue screen and see what happens

I am new to the forum, so excuse the coming right in with a problem. I found some useful stuff on this forum doing research on what I am seeing so hopefully you guys can help. A couple of months back Dell replaced our mother board (extended warranty) and from the next day on our system has bluescreened almost daily with a "A process or thread crucial to system operation has unexpectedly exited or been terminated...". The code keeps changing, although its always 000000F4 and its always a process (00000003). The other part changes everytime. ALSO... and this is odd, post crash on the next reboot the system will tell me that the hard drive is locked and can not be accessed. But its not, if I pull it out and put it back in, its fine (but until I do pull it out and put it back in it will continue to think its locked). I wish I had a memory dump file, but it does not seem to make one - it just sits on the blue screen until I go ahead and force a reset and when I do get the system back up and going the dump is not there. I just changed it to do a full dump instead of a minidump but my guess is that it wont be able to write out the file at all. Here is what I have tried. 1) I went back to an old hard drive that I had that had worked on this system before they changed the motherboard... It crashes the same exact way 2) I wiped my system, reformatted the hard drive, only installed the dell drivers, an antivirus (bitdefender) and windows updates. Problem is still there. I also used superantispyware after it had crashed once to do a second look check to see if something was getting past bitdefender - clean. So this is not a software problem, not a spyware or a virus. 3) I wiped my system on the other hard drive, did the exact same as above but used trendmicro... problem is still there. So this is unlikely related to the particular antivirus. 4) I will say I tried building the system without an antivirus at all and it went a whole day without crashing. Which sometimes it does not crash for a couple of days or even a week or two, so maybe its just been lucky (sometimes it crashes 3 times a day, you never know), or maybe without the antivirus eating up memory and hitting files all the time its simply not pushed as hard. Dell is insisting this is a software problem and not a hardware problem. Which seems real real real odd to me considering that the introduction of this motherboard caused the problem to instantly happen on 2 separate and previously fine system setups. But the motherboard makes it past their diagnostics so it must be fine.... The closest match I found on the forums was http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t80150.html but like I said, I am unable to get a dump post crash. Here is my theory, let me know if you think it holds water at all. The problem is related to reading the paging file. But basically something is wrong with the hard drive controller, cabling whatever, that sets this hard drive into thinking it is locked. So when it goes to read the file it is denied. And so it crashes. Then even when it goes to write to the dump file, it is denied because the hard drive is still seen as locked. Whatever is wrong is somehow reset when I pop the hard drive out and pop it back in... The darn thing still has a warranty but the level 2 tech support guy does not want to believe its a hardware problem.