BSOD 0x0000001E.... Hardware or Software Problem?

[raybob95]

Well, every single night for the past 5 days in between 12AM and 8AM my PC has been blue screening (I'm not awake when it happens). Throughout my PC's life, it's had some problems blue-screening but I've always been able to fix it. Since June 2009 when I installed my OS, I've had to restore backups at least 3 times, and I used to have a ton of problems with Vista refusing to start, etc., but it always got over it and worked eventually. In fact, up until now I haven't had a BSOD since 2010. Anyway, the BSOD cited low disk space as my issue. My disk space is that same as it's been for a year, and it's not low, so that can't be the issue. Next I thought about my OCZ Vertex going bad again (I'm on my 3rd one) but that can't be the issue since I performed checks on it and all went well... additionally every time it died before it would simply lock up the computer not BSOD. Anyway this BSOD really worries me because it happens consistently and I haven't been able to reproduce it during the day. I've tried MemTest (no errors), Prime95 for my overclock (ran for an hour, no errors, stable temps) as well as running my AntiVirus which I thought could be the problem since it runs only at night. This BSOD is especially bad for me because it increases the risk of data corruption since 3 of my 4 disks are encrypted (the ones with web-server data, only 1 of which I have a recent backup of), as well as because I'm trying to run a website with a virtual machine. Yes, my PC stays on 24-7 and since June 2009 when I built it has run over 17,000 hours, according to HD Tune. One thing I did was view the Windows Error Log, and one thing I noticed was that it seemed to be having a continuous problem with Windows.edb. I tried restoring it from a backup AND deleting it, neither solved the issue. Also, in the report I generated just now I noticed some odd things... it said my USB drive is unable to start which is incorrect because I'm using it now, and it also said it doesn't have a registered anti-virus. Wtf? AVG is running right now and it's never alerted it to me before. Like I said, my OS has a long history of data corruption and lots of weird problems that usually seem to fix themselves. Anyway, this BSOD completely baffles me and I would really appreciate some help. I have attached a 3% compressed ZIP folder with some minidumps, etc. Also my PC was built in June 2009 and not until December 2010 did I start a web-server.... yes I went a bit overboard on the specs but I was just coming off a PC with an Athlon 64 and 512MB of RAM. Also, I'm just remembering now that a few days before this nightly BSOD started, a few odd things happened while I was using the computer. First, I was just browsing the internet and all of a sudden the computer became deathly slow. I looked into Task Manager and it said my RAM usage was at 5.94GB and there was over 12GB on the page file! I looked at the processes and explorer.exe was taking over 2GB of RAM. That was right after I received some Windows error message (sadly I can't remember what it said). I shut down my VMWare to clear up 1.5GB of RAM, and as soon as the RAM usage was down, explorer.exe immediately grew to fill in the space, so I was back to the same situation as before. Next, I just went and ended the process explorer.exe. Of course, that didn't fare so well so I had to reboot. No problems after that. However, another oddity was that all of a sudden a file called ntuser.dat started appearing on my G:\ drive. I have no idea why that was there, that belongs in the user profiles on the C:\ doesn't it. Odd. Also, just this morning when I rebooted from the blue-screen, my custom login screen background had reset to default!! Clearly something very odd is happening here. Also, I just ran sfc /scannow in the CMD and it said it found some corrupt files but was unable to fix some of them.... Another neat piece of information is that for some reason my Firefox keeps randomly locking up....

Do you think this is hardware or software? Clealy there's some data corruption going on here.




ZIP Folder with minidumps

SPECS: (homebuilt, June 2009)

Windows Vista Home Premium x64
4 drives, an OCZ Vertex 60GB, WD 1TB, Samsung 1.5TB, Samsung 2TB
Gigabyte EX58-uD3R Motherboard
6GB OCZ Platinum DDR3 RAM
750W PSU, Voltages are fine
EVGA GTX 275 GPU
ASUS TV Card
5 Optical drives, 3 internal, 2 external
Core i7 920 CPU at 3.2GHz (tested stable)

 

[tsnor]

omg. good luck.

Whether its software or hardware at the root, sounds like the software stack is hurt. I'd save data, rebuild from scratch. restore your data. If that stabilizes it then you're done. From the errors you are getting, it sound like you are past the past where you've started to pick up secondary failures caused by broken data caused by the original problem. I wouldn't trust the system with its current software load. (Aside: suggest you also ask to get this looked at by the windows forum. Not sure how cross posting works here). In any case, I would rebuild. Hopefully that will fix things.

If a new software build starts to have problems then I'd pull the SSD because the error rate on SSDs is high. Not sure why, but it is. Bad hardware, bad firmware, etc. See if that stabilizes system.