BSOD Before and After Clean Win7 Install

Okay, thanks. Disk check also reported no problems.

In addition to the instructions given by Koolkat for Driver Verifier, you also do not want to select 'Force Pending I/O Requests' and 'IRP Logging' checks. The former often causes false positives and is only designed to be operated by the driver developer, and the latter is worthless.

Once it is setup, restart the system and let the system crash some and then send us the crashdumps. It may cause a boot loop like what Koolkat hinted too, which you'll want to enter Safe Mode to turn off Driver Verifier from there then enter normal Windows and upload us the new crashdumps.

Sorry, I know it's been a while. A family emergency came up and I barely even thought about or used my laptop. I'm going to attach the CrystalDiskInfo and Speccy screenshots you asked for, as well as three crash dumps that I got since I've started using my laptop again. I'll get started on the Driver Verifier stuff.

If I'm reading the values correctly - and these are unusually screwy numbers I'm looking at - there's some items that are particularly disconcerting, such as CRC errors, all for your SSD drive. Again, these may just be vendor-established values that I am not interpreting correctly, but it does appear there to be some issues. The thing I would check for is your power and data cables hooked to your SSD and confirm that both ends of each are fastened correctly, since CRC errors especially represent an issue with cabling. If you have a spare data cable try that as well.

I'll await till you provide us crashdumps from Driver Verifier to continue investigating this, but there's a possibility the SSD may not be doing so hot, either by a problem internally, a cabling issue or a motherboard problem. Samsungs are currently top dog in terms of reliability (aside from their Sandforce controller drives, like all Sandforce drives) but there's still always the possibility of getting a dud. We'll want to continue looking into this further to verify this as the issue. However this does coincide with the fact that I/O during crashdump generation is suddenly halted due to some unforseen error or hangup.

So I ran Driver Verifier for about two days. I had two crashes, but both times it never got to the BSOD and didn't create a dump. It would hang at a scrambled screen for like 10 min and then I would just hard shut down. I disabled Driver Verifier and got two more crashes that created dumps, so I'll attach those. Should I try Driver Verifier again?

Try it once more to make sure it wasn't coincidental. Otherwise, it's not going to make things easy for us without DV. However, I honestly don't think it'll help much anyways, since all your symptoms - including the scrambled hangs when DV is on - points finger at hardware issues.

I would recommend considering evaluation of your Samsung drive. Have you tried removing the drive entirely and running the system on a Windows installation on the other drive?

Okay. Is there a way to determine what hardware is causing the problem? I've been monitoring the Samsung drive and the CRC error count has not gone up since I took that screenshot. Also, the Samsung drive is much newer than the WD drive and the WD drive is the original Windows installation drive that started having BSODs.

Well if that's the case then there shouldn't be anything to worry about the SSD drive. The CRC errors may just be something that's internally resolved. Still wouldn't hurt to refit the cables n stuff for it though just in case.

Aside from hardware diagnostic software and swapping hardware, there isn't really any sure measure of finding hardware problems. If the problem eludes the software diagnostics, then you have to end up swapping hardware through process of elimination to find the culprit.

The usual hardware testing I have people run through are mentioned below in the copypaste:


RAM: Memtest86+ - 7+ passes
CPU: Prime95 - Torture Test; Blend; overnight (9+ hours) followed by Large FFTs 9+ hour run.
Drives: Seatools - All basic tests aside from the Fix all or the advanced ones.

All of these are included in the UBCD if you prefer a Live CD environment (which is the best environment to test hardware on). Note that Prime95 currently does not work on the latest version of UBCD due to a bug. Also, please provide us temps/voltages using HWInfo with Sensors only option checked. Log two 30-minute instances: one for idle, and one for high load. If you can get the system to crash during high load logging, that's even better. Last, make sure that when running Prime95 that you check temps during first 30 minutes or so to see if temps are stable. Prime95 runs very hot so be sure your cooling can handle it before letting it run extensively.

So for the past 4 days I haven't gotten any BSOD, which was weird because I was getting 1-2 a day. Then today I got like 6. Also I reseated the cables for my SSD and HDD. I don't have any extra SATA cables to replace and see if that helps though. I ran memtest for many passes before, when I first posted here. Probably like 20+ passes of each stick in each slot without any errors. And I ran Seatools on my SSD and HDD and they passed without problems. I'll test with Prime95 and the HWInfo and get back to you. Also, let me know if you want the crash dumps I've gotten since last posting them.