|
Hey guys, I've been getting a pretty annoying blue screen of death rather often recently. I used to only get BSoDs maybe once every 2 months, but in the past week alone, I've gotten over a dozen BSoDs, sometimes within minutes of each other. I checked out some solutions after googling it, but none have worked so far.
The messages I get vary from pfn_list_corrupt to memory_management to irql_not_equal, and the latest one didn't have anything at all, just the general BSoD screen and message.
I read that it might be a graphics card error, so I updated the drivers from ATI's site (I have a 4870) but immediately after restarting my computer, I got a bsod and then another one within 5 minutes. I uninstalled the old drivers and tried again, this time without the Catalyst Control Center, just the video driver, and that seemed to have fixed it, or so I thought.
Originally I had believed that I only bsod during games, and it's happened to me in SC2, Team Fortress 2, Warcraft 3, and even Recettear, but sometimes I get the error even when watching videos or movies I downloaded, or watching a stream such as the GSL on Gom player, or any streams in general on Justin.tv and the like.
I ran the memory tester that you access during startup, and there was no problem with my memory according to that, but I figured I should get memtest and do a more thorough check.
If nothing works, I figure I might have to reformat my hard drive completely to see if that works (reformatting will remove all faulty drivers and software, correct?)
Edit: solved
|
Did you notice any artifacts or abnormalities on the screen while using your computer? Or did it just bsod as soon as you booted up the game? When my video card burned out, there were a lot of artifacts on the screen, and it would bsod after just a few seconds of play. (SC2 would just bsod after login).
|
no artifacts, and it happens randomly during games, not as soon as i boot them up. sometimes i'll be able to get through a full session of sc2 with my friends (maybe up to 3 hours) and other times, i'll bsod during the first or second game
someone i know had the same problem, and she said memtest didn't detect anything, but she replaced the ram anyways and stopped getting bsods
i haven't installed any new hardware or software since I started getting them either. I was actually away from my computer for a month for vacation (before this, i almost never got bsods) but when I came back, I started getting them. It may have been some software I suppose? Though I don't really remember what I installed since then. I could always try a system restore back to before I came back.
Edit: I just got another BSoD, this time it was a bad_pool_header seems that I really do have some bad drivers, though I don't know why the problem has only started so recently.
Is there any software out there that will effectively remove all my old drivers? I want to do a fresh install of my drivers, as I hear that if you install new drivers without removing the old ones, you may still get problems
At the moment, I'm following some instructions to turn on Driver Verifier and wait for a BSoD to occur to see if it is indeed a driver causing the problem.
edit 2: I tried to stream and got a special_pool_detected_memory_corruption BSoD a few minutes into it.
|
I would run a program called http://www.memtest.org/, and just let it run for 2-3 hours make sure its not an issue with your ram. There are a couple ways to use that program you just download a .ISO file and burn it to a CD, the other option is they have an installer to make a bootable USB.
Based on what your describing it sounds like you could have faulty ram which is why it only happens when your doing something that it uses a lot of memory such as SC2 and viewing flash. It's a good test and its a good easy thing to check.
If that turns up nothing, the next thing I would do is check the Hard Drives make sure your not having any Hard Drives dieing. I use the software made by seagate called SeaTools found here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools
If both of them turn up good I would then start suspecting a driver issue but the first thing I would want to check is those 2 problems that I mentioned.
|
i'd check to see if your ram sticks are properly seated just in case.
|
i have that problem too with my 4870, but i dont think it has to with the drivers in general. Do you have Microsoft Security Essentials? if so, exit the process in task manager and see if you still have bsods. Apparently mse has problems with java based videos. I had Windows Vista on my old system and now i have windows 7 installed and it works fine, only 1 bsod in 1 week now.
|
Would be nice to know the error code for the bsod, that would help a lot.
You allso should do the following 1. download newest gpu driver 2. download driver sweeper 3. uninstall driver (dont reboot yet) 4. use driver sweeper and remove all remaining ati drivers (nvidia too if you have any) 5. reboot 6. install the drivers you downloaded at point 1.
Clean driver install tends to help fix a lot of problems.
|
i had a faulty stick of memory. i ran memtest with both sticks, got errors took out one stick of ram, ran memtest again, got errors took out this stick and put in the other stick, no errors
haven't gotten a BSoD since
|
I would suggest analyzing the crash dumps Windows automatically generates upon the blue-screens. They often contain valuable information such as which driver was most likely the cause of the crash. It usually points you in the right direction, as opposed to blindly testing hardware.
WhoCrashed is a good tool for this.
From my experiences and the symptoms you have described, I would say the 4. most likely causes to the problems you are having are:
1. Defective graphics card 2. Defective power supply 3. Defective RAM 3. Cooling / overheating issue's
edit: Oops! You had already solved the issue ^^ Glad to hear
|
i tried using bluescreenview to see my dump files, but across the dozen or so dump files I viewed, there were several different possible drivers being highlighted, and none of them were specific software or hardware drivers. a lot were something about kernel, so I had no idea what to do.
I posted my dump files onto sevenforums, and they really helped me figure out what was wrong.
as to WHY the ram failed, i'll probably never know, could be overheating i suppose. I plan on upgrading my system in the next month when I replace my ram to optimize cooling and airflow
anyways solved
|
|
|
|