on that note I can tell you from personal experience that the drivers provided by windows update for the intel 3000 are garbage. They almost killed my machine. You have to go direct to intel's download center and track the most recent one there.
Fixed the only problem I had on this entire build.
Looks like we've identified the problem! On pass no.4 errors started turning up and here's a screencap with the report from pass no.6:
I'm going to follow up on this because the machine was behaving badly BEFORE I installed the RAM that's in there now. Did you happen to look at some of my earlier dump files? I'm specifically wondering about the files from 11/1/2011, 11/26/2011, and 12/10/2011 which happened with the OEM RAM installed. Maybe the OEM RAM was bad as well? I remember back then the problem would be the machine hanging and freezing up with out going BSOD so maybe that was a driver issue that I've since resolved?
This could even be a problem with one of the slots on the motherboard itself. A problem that only occurs when the heat reaches a certain level.
That kind of problem is pretty rare though.
Receiving bad ram happens all the time. And if it's warranty or still meets RMA conditions it's generally easy to return for replacement, as the manufacturer and dealers both realize DOA ram is a reality of life.
There could also be a problem with your specific motherboard / ram you chose combination.
There are a lot of reasons for ram to start misbehaving. Personally, if it's new I would just RMA it if you get the same issue from the next set it's time to start considering the motherboard might be to blame.
So, the seems the problem might be more than the RAM. The machine hung this morning while I was using the internet and when I powered it on this afternoon it refused to boot and it looks like my hard drive is shot:
After attempting auto repair and rebooting it refused and a second analysis revealed this:
Attempted repair again and now I'm getting this when I try to boot:
Thoughts? Is my RAM and (now) hard drive bad? Virus? Any insight is greatly appreciated!
Who makes your hard drive?
You could download their utility and use it to check your drive.
A member here made a list of the vendors/sites
here
Hard Drive Diagnostic Procedure
we've already determined one stick was bad for sure. So it could still be to blame or there could actually be something going on with the hard drive you're going to have to check.
Don't have a CD at the moment to run the manufacturer diagnostic tool, but I ran chkdsk on the drive (via USB hard drive reader connected to my desktop) and it came back with no errors.
Okay, so I tried running Seagate's hard drive tool and it won't recognize the drive. As mentioned above, I did run chkdsk on the drive using my desktop and a USB-Sata reader and it showed no errors.
Also, I pulled the aftermarket RAM and re-installed the OEM 4Gb stick and there is no change. On the first boot up I received another c000021a error. Time for RMA? An IT friend suggested the MB might be shot.
Last edited by st0kEd; 02 May 2012 at 17:36. Reason: too many 0's in the error code
Called ASUS tech support and they instructed me to run their recovery module which wipes the OS partition and performs a clean install of Windows. Did this last night and spent this morning installing Windows updates as well as updating drivers. The machine has been well behaved so far and boots up and runs as it should. So for the time being the fresh install seems to have solved the problem, but I'm going to see how things are a week from now before saying case closed. And as happy as I am to have the machine up and running again, I am disappointed that we weren't able to determine the root cause of the issue.
Thanks to those who helped!
I would be careful when applying updates, since it is working now, you should probably avoid making any updates of drivers through windows update. I have a feeling win update may have installed a driver your system didn't agree with. Namely chipset or hdd controller related.
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