BSOD help

[Maleko]

I ran memtest over night last night, 8 hours solid, no problems.

have run orthos before, took it to work so ran it for a few hours, no probs...

liek today, not one BSOD, and ive been playing COD4, yet last night i had loads watching LOST in itunes...:S

[ripken204]

ah, the mysteries of computers. i hate it when its impossible to get the error to pop up again.

[puntoMX]

Change or reseat the ATA cables. Test your HDD(s).

I’m, almost sure it’s not your PSU like other state above.

If that doesn’t help, a big chance your mobo or VGA card is on it’s way out...

[Maleko]

i'll reseat the ata cables, but i have already tested the harddrives, both come bk fine.

cant be gfx, as did it before i upgraded my card, mobo - could be.

Im going to buy a new PSU anyway, as ill need one for my upgrade next year i feel.

[jcarle]

I think the basics are being overlooked, it's obvious you're having a hardware generate problem. Wasting your time with drivers isn't going to solve hardware issues.

There's somethings which you've obviously eliminated due to some of the simple testing you've done.

In my opinion, the problem is NOT your motherboard, processor or memory. I find it unlikely that it would be your power supply due to the fact that your computer will not consistently BSOD during situations where your power draw would be at it's maximum and will when power draw is low.

This leaves possible areas. Video Card, Hard Drive or Optical Drive.

And before anyone says it's impossible that the optical drive and/or it's cable could be responsible, it IS possible if the data gets corrupted as it's copied/read from the optical drive. Although, again, due to the fact that you're able to install windows without any issues, I'm also thinking it's unlikely.

I did notice that you're running your system drive in RAID 0. Unless you have a dedicated hardware RAID card, you would have no way of knowning if one of your drives was failing since software RAID (yes, chipset RAID is still software based RAID) do not habitually read SMART data.

If this was my system, what I would do to diagnose the situation, I would try the following in the following order:

1) Delete the RAID array and install a fresh copy of Windows on a single drive.

2) If still unstable, I'd try either running with on-board video or another video card.

And go from there...

[Maleko]

Well, as i was going to buy a new PSU anyway, i did and just fitted it - ahve now remembered how much i hate fitting new PSU's and yes how important cable management is, but also how annoying! lol

anyway, time will tell if this has any effect on it, but if it doesnt fix it i know my next step will be hard drives, cheers jcarle

[Maleko]

Ok..this was fine up until today...i had no problems since my last post until tonight.

watching a film, bam, bsod, no file or message, just bsod.

rebooted, finsihed film, loaded up COD4, got in game, 20 secs, bam, gone again, this time kmixer.sys

rebooted, then rebooted again to be on safe side.

loaded COD4 again...same, bam, bsod, this time with BAD_POOL_CALLER

How random can u get?

goign to run memtest again, but that never picked sommit up before, so doubt it will this time.

onyl other option will be to delete my raid, rebuild it, and re-install?

[Maleko]

ok, different approach...

didnt tihnk of this b4, so giving it a shot, i flashed my bios to a beta bios ages ago, and have just read of problems with it, so ive flashed it back to the last stable release...see wat happens

[Maleko]

bah, didnt make a difference, lol

I've reverted back to my CD version of my SATA Raid drivers, possibility/..

[jcarle]

I have you run in depth tests on your hard drives?

[Maleko]

yeh, both came back fine.

just need time to do what you suggested, re-doing the raid etc.

[Fungus]

Grab prime95 and do a torture test. This should rule out CPU/RAM as the cause.

I've had similar problems on other machines, and it ended up being NVIDIA drivers. Unfortunately there is no fix for this most of the time, because they do not test their drivers extensively on older hardware, and rarely listen to any reports about issues... that's how it goes.

You could also have some settings improper in your BIOS, make sure everything is set to the Specifications of your particular HW (CPU, RAM) and don't rely on "Auto" settings because these are often incorrect.

[Maleko]

already ran similar cpu and mem tests, defo aint cpu or ram, not nivdia drivers, using 8800GTS card with latest drivers, and has been doing it for x2 driver version updates.

Got my updated XP CD ready, so going to flatten it this week and re-build raid etc...see what happens...sigh

[jcarle]

Try using different SATA cables.

[Maleko]

did the format last night.

deleted the raid, low level format on both drives, then rebuilt raid using 128k chunk cluster thingys instead of 64, and has made a big speed increase!

anyway, time will tell now...lol