Inconsistent String of atapi.sys BSODs

[Mystiq]

Three days ago I had a game (World of Warcraft) running and was watching TV while not playing and all of a sudden Windows 7 bluescreens with IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL in atapi.sys. I rebooted thinking it was a fluke only to get the same error just a few minutes later after running the game again. This happened about 4 or 5 times, even simply browsing the Internet, downloading a file, or copying files in Windows Explorer. Of my two hard drives, the bigger one has an installation of Windows XP, where the computer is perfectly stable in the middle of this string of Win7 BSODs (booting up again in 7 and it will still happen). Eventually I unplugged my DVD drive and it stopped. Also in the middle of all this, I checked my RAM with various utilities and it checked out ok.

Two days later, it started again. I unplugged my bigger hard drive and so far it appears to have stopped again but I'm not hopeful because as I said Windows XP is fine. I'm not sure if this is a bug in Windows 7 or a genuine hardware problem. I do not have Daemon Tools or other CD drive emulation programs installed. I have absolutely no idea what would have started this. No new programs have been installed in about 4 weeks. I submitted this as a feedback within Windows 7 as well.

Edited March 29, 2009 by Mystiq

[cluberti]

I'd say it could be some protection software installed with a game. For example, some games install "punkbuster", which has known Win7 incompatibilities, and a compatible version isn't expected until around RTM. There are others, and knowing it's an atapi.sys bugcheck (I'd like to see the actual .dmp files to confirm), it probably isn't atapi.sys (considering the one on XP is quite similar to the one on Vista and Win7).

[Mystiq]

I've zipped a couple of the minidumps this BSOD has created so far. And now you mention PunkBuster, I did install the Quake 4 demo, but that was about 2 weeks ago.

Minidump.zip

Edited March 30, 2009 by Mystiq

[cluberti]

Well, as it's always good to check, it is indeed an architecture issue. This is supposedly included and fixed in March builds of Win7, as it has already been fixed in Vista/2008, in KB967352.

[Mystiq]

Eh? I'm not using Hibernate.

[cluberti]

Eh? I'm not using Hibernate.

It's known to occur in systems doing any power state changes, not just going to sleep or hibernate, and it's also known to happen when mixing IDE and SATA devices (I don't know about pure SATA on a box, for example) or when a SATA controller has devices in IDE emulation mode. Unfortunately we all know KB articles can sometimes be too vague about the problem.

[Mystiq]

But why would it start so suddenly? It also happens if I had my DVD (IDE) drive unplugged.

[cluberti]

It's an I/O problem, so any latent I/O could cause it from what I can tell. It'd be easier to say with a full dump, as a lot of the data isn't here, but what I see matches what I've seen with this in the past on Vista systems, and there was a hotfix (again, above link) released in February to fix it. Knowing that Win7 is still in development, they probably have this in Win7 in builds in March of some timeframe.

[laserpanda]

exact same problem with windows 7 after getting a new motherboard.

Only solution that works is unplugging my 1 TB hard drive and only using the 250GB that the OS is on

[cluberti]

exact same problem with windows 7 after getting a new motherboard.

Only solution that works is unplugging my 1 TB hard drive and only using the 250GB that the OS is on

If you can get access to a build later than the beginning of March (I think 7024 was the first build in March), it'd be interesting to see if it's fixed there.