TrevMUN

Alright. Should I image the disc before or after I perform chkdsk? I sw some people saying chkdsk resulted in the loss of several files, folders going empty, etc. That's why I opted to copy my personal and necessary files to a USB drive now.

Still haven't run the driver verifier yet, been too busy with a move and several end-of-semester things going on at once. However, the day after moving my rig to the new place, I woke up to Acronis Drive Monitor alerting me that a high-risk critical event had occurred at 5:00 AM my time: "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume Primary Drive." Error code 55. Primary Drive is my C: drive, of course. It's the first time I've ever seen this happen, at least for as long as I've been using Acronis Drive Monitor. If it happened on the older drives I've had before then, I'd never known about it. Anyway, I looked this up at Microsoft's technet, then ran chckntfs. The drive is indeed "dirty;" my secondary drive isn't. I'm in the middle of making a new copy/backup of my files to a USB drive as I write this. I haven't yet run chkdsk /x (or more likely, have it schedule a chkdsk run when I restart) because I wanted to confer with you guys on some things: Is chkdsk the best tool for the job in this case? Would it be better for me to get Spinrite and run that?Do you guys think just copying my personal and/or necessary files to a USB drive is adequate in this case? Should I be using some kind of hard drive imaging software like Acronis TrueImage or something, if the corrupt file system has led to certain files "disappearing?"I may just buy a new hard drive, create a fresh install of XP64, and start over given the problems I've had with that BSoD issue. Is that wise at this point? Is this error a sign that the drive may be going bad?If I do start fresh on a new hard drive, would the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard copy over things like drivers/etc.? If the BSoDs have been caused by a bad driver, I don't want to migrate them to a fresh copy and keep having the same problems ...

Looking into this now. Should I just run it with standard options, or ... ? Well, I hadn't actually updated my graphics card drivers until the rash of BSoDs started happening. However, I will be interested to find out if there's some kind of driver corruption going on. If there is, though, you'd think that uinstalling the driver entirely combined with nVidia's Clean Install option would have taken care of it ... All I know is, I'm regretting having ever installed Renegade-X's open beta, however fun I found the game and however much I love Command and Conquer. (There has been at least one verified issue: Renegade-X's Open Beta 1 would delete the entire Start Menu folder for the current user when uninstalled, so it leaves open the possibility that Renegade-X's devs left something in game that's caused this issue.) My rig's parts aren't as old as that. The oldest parts on the rig at present are actually the RAM and CPU, both from 2008. The motherboard is from 2009, the video card is from 2011, and the hard drives are from 2012. I am looking forward to overhauling this machine with something based around Haswell-E or Skylake once they hit the marketplace ... Most likely Skylake, since by that time DDR4 prices are expected to start coming down from premium and it gives me more time to build up the funds for the overhaul. (My machine will still be using XP64 though!)

Argh, it happened again not even five hours later! This time I got an entirely different BSoD error message, though. Here's what WhoCrashed says: On Fri 5/9/2014 12:09:18 PM GMT your computer crashed crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini050914-02.dmp This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x2E890) Bugcheck code: 0xC5 (0xFFFFFADD991B37A8, 0x2, 0x1, 0xFFFFF800011A9B28) Error: DRIVER_CORRUPTED_EXPOOL file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System company: Microsoft Corporation description: NT Kernel & System Bug check description: This indicates that the system attempted to access invalid memory at a process IRQL that was too high. This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. This might be a case of memory corruption. More often memory corruption happens because of software errors in buggy drivers, not because of faulty RAM modules. The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver which cannot be identified at this time. As far as what I was doing: I had launched Steam again to let it finish updating itself/my games library. I opened a few games just to poke at them (such as the Minimum open beta, to see if I could run it--and I can). Ace Combat Assault Horizon for the PC was the other game I opened briefly. Unlike Minimum, ACAH's screen would flicker black occasionally. I shut the game down after a minute of poking at its options. The crash happened all of a sudden an hour or two later when I had Opera, Firefox, Winamp, and OpenOffice open. The sound from Winamp hung in a looping state. Here's the .dmp file for this crash. Mini050914-02.zip Here you go. CPU-Z Information.zip EDIT: Should I also post the dmp files from all the previous crashes since March?

I've never heard of this program until you mentioned it, and due to finals week I didn't have time to figure out what you meant by SPD data. I was going to try and set aside time to do that once finals ended, but wouldn't you know, I got yet another BSoD just earlier. This is what WhoCrashed has to say about it: On Fri 5/9/2014 7:57:57 AM GMT your computer crashed crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini050914-01.dmp This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x2E890) Bugcheck code: 0xA (0x1C, 0x2, 0x1, 0xFFFFF800010F141F) Error: IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System company: Microsoft Corporation description: NT Kernel & System Bug check description: This indicates that Microsoft Windows or a kernel-mode driver accessed paged memory at DISPATCH_LEVEL or above. This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver which cannot be identified at this time. Different error message than the previous crash. I didn't notice any particular file mentioned in the BSoD message this time. Between now and the previous crash I had been doing a lot of work in 3D Studio Max and Adobe Illustrator working on projects for my classes at uni. However, when the crash happened I didn't have them open. I had Opera, Firefox, and Pale Moon open: Firefox had an active tab with a video on it. Steam was also running, as I was letting it update itself/my library of games, but I had no actual game programs going. Also, since you mentioned requiring it last time, MagicAndre, I've included the .dmp file for this crash if anyone wants to look at it. Mini050914-01.zip EDIT: Okay, I just downloaded, installed, and ran CPU-Z to find out what MagicAndre meant by the SPD and RAM timings. I'm not entirely sure what it is that needs to match. All four RAM sticks report a timings table of 333 MHz (JEDEC #2), 400 MHz (JEDEC #3), 400 MHz (EPP #1), and 333 MHz (EPP #2). All four sticks have a max bandwidth of PC2-6400 (400 MHz) and are using EPP 1.0. There is no difference in any of them that CPU-Z reports.

Another article in the FUD campaign! http://www.extremetech.com/computing/181733-microsoft-patches-ie-bug-in-windows-xp-but-its-a-huge-mistake Don't you love all these political cartoon-esque images of XP sprinkled with graves and zombies?

The butthurt goes ever on and on! Of course, Microsoft's shills in tech journalism were already hopping mad about Microsoft extending support for XP back in bygone years. Wow, that is a whole new level of zeal I haven't seen in Microsoft's FUD campaign before. That tops the whole "treating XP users like drug addicts" intervention campaign Microsoft attempted. I wonder what kind of kool-aid they gave that guy.

Well, well, well ... And here Microsoft was trying to use this as part of their FUD campaign.

They and the throng of shills buying into the FUD campaign, yeah. "Don't say we didn't warn you! This is why you should have listened to us when we said buy the latest Windows version!!!" ... never mind that there are many other browser alternatives or that all versions of IE are presently vulnerable to the exploit ...

.dmp file attached to this post as a .zip. I checked Event Viewer to see if that's ever come up, but it doesn't look like I've been hit by that problem. I'll keep this in mind if it ever does show up though. Mini042614-01.zip

Cute. Real cute, Microsoft.

Well, it was almost 19 days before I had another BSoD. Almost fooled me into thinking the clean reinstall of the nVidia drivers fixed the problem. However, it just happened again, another PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. Here's what WhoCrashed has to say about it: On Sun 4/27/2014 3:12:54 AM GMT your computer crashed crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini042614-01.dmp This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x2E890) Bugcheck code: 0x50 (0xFFFFFA880C4857C0, 0x0, 0xFFFFF97FFF0416BC, 0x5) Error: PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntoskrnl.exe product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System company: Microsoft Corporation description: NT Kernel & System Bug check description: This indicates that invalid system memory has been referenced. This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver which cannot be identified at this time. The actual BSoD screen didn't mention ntoskrnl.exe, however, but win32k.sys. As far as the circumstances of the crash, I can tell you that I had both Opera and Firefox running, as well as City of Heroes (I'd been using the demorecord system for a school project). Both browsers had at 15+ tabs open each. Firefox was in the foreground on a YouTube page, as I was listening to videos from a playlist while mucking around in CoH. I had tabbed to and from CoH multiple times, going between Firefox and CoH checking on certain commands I'd need to for the demorecord system. The BSoD happened as I was tabbed out of CoH and looking at Firefox the currently playing video on the playlist: there was a second or two of looped audio and screen freeze, followed by the BSoD screen. Several of the other BSoDs since March involved having both Firefox and Opera open, and YouTube as well as a game being involved as well. There does seem to be some kind of pattern there. Where should I go from here, you guys think?

I was asking about this on the XP64 forums, and it was said that chipset drivers aren't necessary to run the OS on that sort of equipment. You'd just be missing out on optimization. I'm less concerned about squeezing every last drop of performance out of my current hardware than I am upgrading to new standards. I'm willing to forgo drivers so long as the OS still runs on the hardware just fine.