Help Please

[Griffolion]

I have documented my troubles here before and since then i have not gotten very far. For the last 2 or so weeks, my computer has had trouble with BSoDing, a problem that has NEVER occurred before in the 6 months i have built it. It happened after i re-seated my GFX card and sound card to different positions to get more air to the GFX card. Admittadly, i forgot to uninstall the drivers in the previous position before i re-seated them, however the drivers installed into the new positions just fine. The other reason why i re-seated them was to see if it resolved an issue of a NVidia driver failing to respond when playing games (nvlddmkm, i think thats right) however it did not work, infact, this was when the BSoDs begain.

I uninstalled drivers for both cards and reinstalled them fresh, this failed to resolve it. The BSoDs are erratic at best, sometimes they can come as soon as i log onto windows, other times they only occur maybe an hour or 2 into operation. I system restored hoping to maybe resolve any potential problems in the registry/kernal however this did not resolve it. The BSoDs are also very varied, rarely being consistent with one another (i may paraphrase here, i apologise):
USB_BUGCHECK_ERROR
CACHE_MANAGER_ERROR
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_SAME
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA
... and others but i cant remember.

Some codes i got:
000000FE
0000001E
00000034

Windows Memory Tester found hardware issues with the RAM, i am currently in talks with Corsair about RMA'ing them. Also, Memtest v 3.5 on single-core will reboot the computer 3 seconds into testing and act as if nothing happened until it boots again. The same program run on multi-core will not even begin the test, it seems to hang.

Sometimes before vista starts, windows will come up with the recovery screen asking what option i wish to choose (safe mode, normal mode etc) and it will say that 'last time windows failed to start because the kernal may be corrupt'.

CHKDSK tells me the hard drive has no errors.

Dxdiag shows no errors too.


I'm totally stumped really, and my limited spare hardware makes it hard for me to do trial and error. Mind if i get some of your opinions?

AMD Phenom 9950 Quad 3.0 GHz (OC)
4GB Corsair Dominator DDR2 XMS2 PC-8500, 5-5-5-15, Ganged Mode
1GB XFX GTX 280 XXX (182.50 Driver)
Creative X-FI Titanium Fatal1ty
Asus Crosshair II BIOS 1802 (latest at time of writing)
North Q Siberian Tiger water cooler (CPU maxes at 42, normal operation at 33-35)
1GB Samsung Spinpoint F1 7200 RPM
1200W Xigmatek NRP
Pioneer BDC-202 Blu Ray Drive

Any and all suggestions appreciated, thanks for reading.

Quick edit:

When Vista reboots after a BSoD, my ESET Smart Security 4 anti virus software will come up telling me the automated scanner failed to start due to a critical error upon start up and suggested to totally re-install the software, this has never happened before until now. However, when i boot Vista from a normal BSoDless shutdown, the scanner is just fine. Could this be a Kernal driver issue maybe??

Thanks for reading.

 

[Guest]

Sounds like your memory is at fault, is it 4x1gb or 2x2gb, try running with 1 or two modules, and memtest each module individually, had this problem with 4gb crucial memory and it turned out to be one module, rna was fast and excellant by crucial and stable ever since

 

[Griffolion]

Thanks Moricon, ill get back to this thread after testing.

I do suspect the RAM primarily, but so many different faults have been thrown (and so inconsistently too) i honestly couldnt confirm the suspicion.

As i said, Corsair will hopefully send me replacement sticks should they find something wrong.

(Oh and its 2 x 2 GB sticks on slots 1 & 2 running in ganged mode)

 

[shortstuff_mt]

This sounds like a classic case of faulty RAM. BSOD's are most often caused by RAM errors. That would also explain the variety in different errors. Who knows what's being written to the dead spot on the RAM. It's most likely not going to be the exact same data every time. Did you manually set the RAM speed/timings/voltage to the manufacturers specs in the BIOS?

 

[ragsters]

Don't worry, when you receive the ram back from rma you will see that all your problems will go away. Bad ram will do weird things to your computer.

 

[Griffolion]

@ Shortstuff_mt

The only things i set manually were the voltage (2.1v from auto 1.95) and the clock speed (1066 from 800). The sticks were rated to be fine like this, i did nothing that was outside of Corsairs guidelines. From these two manual settings, the RAM was automatically set to Nvidia's EPP profile (5-5-5-15-2T).

Thanks for everyones support.