Any ideas?
Hi
I've been having some trouble with a machine for a while which has been randomly rebooting. I have posted about it here before many months ago but since then I've not had chance to get back to it and its just sat in the cupboard abandoned!
Anyway... the missus has left me with some free time to kill so out came the lump this evening to play around with it. Now.. normally as soon as I drag it out of its hole, connect a mouse, KB and monitor it decides to play ball and won't crash. As soon as it goes back and I access it via remote desktop ..... crash... repeatedly. Anyway I got it out again tonight and booted it... for once it decided to wind me up face to face and start crashing. Now.. I've always wondered if it was the hard drive at fault or processor or even possibly the memory (though I've never had memory problems once.. with the exception of my personal memory!). Anyway I ran speedfan... HDD temperatures were normal and so was the CPU. It started crashing which made me suspect the HDD is at fault. Typically it would happen when accessing the hard drive using windows explorer to explore c: or go into the control panel etc.
I assumed that what with zonealarm also complaining that some .dll files were missing (it does that when it reaches a date it doesn't like for some reason) and not being able to uninstall it I decided to reformat and see if that made any difference.
Now... I've reformatted, gone through the install which it seemed to take rather well, was just finally getting to the desktop (after like 1.5 hours of continuous HDD use by the installer) and then it did something I've not experienced for years.. so frightening in fact I've come here to post and show you an image of it - It BLUE SCREENED!
I've not seen a blue screen of death for years using XP so it came as quite a shock especially with a message that I've never seen before: "A driver corrupted pool memory used for holding pages destined for disk."
Anyone know what that means or was my initial suspicion of the HDD being knackered correct?
It just seems really odd that it would crash within minutes running windows yet it could rumble away for over an hour while installing windows before it crashed out. The PSU is a 350W and its a 1.5GHz AMD with 1HDD and 2 opticals. Not overly stretched!
Here is the image taken on my mobile:
Any ideas?
I've been having some trouble with a machine for a while which has been randomly rebooting. I have posted about it here before many months ago but since then I've not had chance to get back to it and its just sat in the cupboard abandoned!
Anyway... the missus has left me with some free time to kill so out came the lump this evening to play around with it. Now.. normally as soon as I drag it out of its hole, connect a mouse, KB and monitor it decides to play ball and won't crash. As soon as it goes back and I access it via remote desktop ..... crash... repeatedly. Anyway I got it out again tonight and booted it... for once it decided to wind me up face to face and start crashing. Now.. I've always wondered if it was the hard drive at fault or processor or even possibly the memory (though I've never had memory problems once.. with the exception of my personal memory!). Anyway I ran speedfan... HDD temperatures were normal and so was the CPU. It started crashing which made me suspect the HDD is at fault. Typically it would happen when accessing the hard drive using windows explorer to explore c: or go into the control panel etc.
I assumed that what with zonealarm also complaining that some .dll files were missing (it does that when it reaches a date it doesn't like for some reason) and not being able to uninstall it I decided to reformat and see if that made any difference.
Now... I've reformatted, gone through the install which it seemed to take rather well, was just finally getting to the desktop (after like 1.5 hours of continuous HDD use by the installer) and then it did something I've not experienced for years.. so frightening in fact I've come here to post and show you an image of it - It BLUE SCREENED!
I've not seen a blue screen of death for years using XP so it came as quite a shock especially with a message that I've never seen before: "A driver corrupted pool memory used for holding pages destined for disk."
Anyone know what that means or was my initial suspicion of the HDD being knackered correct?
It just seems really odd that it would crash within minutes running windows yet it could rumble away for over an hour while installing windows before it crashed out. The PSU is a 350W and its a 1.5GHz AMD with 1HDD and 2 opticals. Not overly stretched!
Here is the image taken on my mobile:
Any ideas?
Why is it a HDD fail?
Maybe it's a memory fail...
Download a Linux CD - these include a memory test.
And/or install Linux and see if it works.
Maybe it's a memory fail...
Download a Linux CD - these include a memory test.
And/or install Linux and see if it works.
Quote from: Crucibleofevil Why is it a HDD fail?
Maybe it's a memory fail...
No.. I've tested that already
Quote from: okrzynska Anyway.. I've downloaded memtest and run it. It's concluded by proudly telling me after 56 minutes that its passed with no errors.
I'm 100% positive knoppix will run but thats not tested. As I write I've thrown knoppix into the cd tray.
Quote from: James_G
Quote from: me or there isn't enough heatsink compound between procesor and fan?
I did wonder about this myself but that wouldn't explain why the machine worked flawlessly for months and then suddenly stopped! Also it can sit there for ages installing windows and just then suddenly give up and die. Also (as stated above) I was running speedfan on it before wiping to reinstall windows and leaving the machine running for over 1/2 hour the temperature at maximum for the cpu was 47C so I've ruled that out too.
Quote from: Paul03 This support page on Microsoft's site might help!
Have you fully reformatted the HDDs during the installation process (not just the quick format option that's offered)?
This page suggests another resolution.
As that fault relates to display adapter drivers - have you checked to see that the graphics card is seated properly (if it's not on board graphics you're using)?
Guilty as charged! GFX card IS seated properly but the last few attempts to install have led to me (in order to save time) I'd been quick formatting. I've done that before with no problems and this time I've tried it over 3 HDs but things still seem to be going a bit screwy with the machine coming up with BSODs too frequently for that to be a serious fault.
Quote from: johpal Can you start Windows in "safe mode"? If so, try "chkdsk /f" and scan the hard disk. It helped me a few weeks ago when my son's laptop crashed with a corrupted driver file.
Bearing in mind I'm still failing to install windows thats a resounding no! It at the moment seems to be a hardware fault and all the errors so far are pointing to one of three things:
1) Memory
2) Hard drive (although 3 defective HDDs?.. come on, not even my luck is THAT bad... is it?)
3) VGA memory.. but the card is seated properly and has always worked flawlessly.
So.. I was sat here last night at 1:30am feeling quite frustrated.. I'd tried all the suggestions above (I tend to only come here after I've exhausted all the normal suggestions) and I was sat here thinking that something on the motherboard must be unstable for some reason.. an intermittent fault shall we say. Suddenly an old memory came back to me.. I even posted about it on this form as a tip: The motherboard clock battery!
I jumped into the bios and lo and behold.. it was running over half a day slow since resetting it yesterday! I grabbed my multimeter and lo and behold it the battery was down to 1.3volts (supposed to be 3v!) so I changed that immediately. That put stop to the BSODs I was getting until I started getting others complaining that files wern't being copied properly from the disk. Several wipes later I got incredibly frustrated. I eventually remembered that the silver part of the disk is on the top of the disk.. looked at that and there is a whopping great scratch on it (the top of the CD I mean)! So.. I'm HOPING that might be the end of it. I'm just about to burn my backup XP cd now so that I can try again. If this fails I really am out of options
Oh.. and that knoppix CD I wrote about further up... It's running perfectly as suspected so I'm pretty sure the memory is good!
Quote from: okrzynska Linux worked fine, I fail to understand why suddenly running code from M$ has become such a big deal. The only other thing I can think of is that now its the CDs that are at fault (and frankly after everything else that has mysteriously gone wrong at exactly the same time that i've fixed i'm finding that hard to beleive!).
Why me?
Perhaps your computer is trying to tell you something?