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hal.dll BSOD on AMD Phenom II (6 cores) 64
I built a new computer 1 year ago on an Asus M4A89TD PRO/USB3 motherboard with a Phenom II AMD64 6 cores CPU running at 3.2 GHz.
The OS is : Windows 7 Service Pack 1, 6.1, build: 7601 full retail.
I recently and repeatedly encountered a crash on my system when using photoshop cs4/bridge application.
The problem seems to occur whenever the system is fully loaded, e.g. when opening a directory (in photoshop/bridge) that contains many pictures and while the photoshop cache builds up.
I also encountered disk errors where the cache resides (i.e. a 300 GB WD velociraptor at 10000rpm) but this is probably the consequence rather than the cause of it.
What is strange is that the same data resided on another (slower) disk and the problem did not occur there. It occured since I moved the data circa 250 GB of pictures) into a newer and faster WD 600 GB velociraptor HD, precisely when building the cache...
Googling on photoshop gave me hints to update to latest graphic drivers, which I did (the graphic card is am ATI Radeon HD 5800 with 1 GB of RAM and I am now on version 8.861.0.0 ). The driver upgrade did not change anything...
The output of "whocrashed" gives me the following hint :
This was probably caused by the following module: hal.dll (hal+0x12A3B)
Bugcheck code: 0x124 (0x0, 0xFFFFFA8007DBB028, 0xB640A000, 0x3B000135)
Error: WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR
file path: C:\Windows\system32\hal.dll
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: Hardware Abstraction Layer DLL
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that a fatal hardware error has occurred. This bug check uses the error data that is provided by the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA).
This is likely to be caused by a hardware problem problem. This problem might be caused by a thermal issue.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.
I would like to add the following: I endured BSODs one year ago and got rid of them once I removed ZoneAlarm and a PCTools anti-virus.
I do not think that the hardware is directly the cause of it, since this is a dual boot config (Ubuntu) and Linux never crashed. Admittedly, photoshop/bridge is consuming a lot more resources than any Linux programs...