BSOD ASUS A8V vsmraid.sys

This is my first experience with this forum, so thanks in advance. I'm a pretty experienced PC user, but this one has me stumped. My computer has historically been quite stable on 32-bit Windows XP Home. I took the plunge and upgraded (total replacement) three systems in our home from XP Home to 32-bit Win7. GENERALLY good experience, but the system in question has had intermittent crashes and has now begun to crash regularly with "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" BSOD pointing to vsmraid.sys .... About which I haven't been able to find much on the 'net.

I have NO experience with low-level debugging or dumps (though I was once able to read OS/360 dumps on IBM mainframes ). So while I understand the concepts, I'll need help supplying the proper files and use of any specific tools. I have a number of 'minidumps', but in the process of monkeying around, I have hit other errors and don't know which one might have the recurring error. I tried to attach one of them to this post, but Win 7 says I don't have permission to open the file, even though I'm supposed to be the administrator.

So, any help would be appreciated. Old as it is, this box generally does what I need it to do, and I always feel bad ditching working / usable hardware, so I'm trying to avoid the obvious step of replacing the old MB / old AGP card / old CPU. I hope you'll bear with me and I'll learn something in the process. Thanks again, sorry for the long post.

Hi. Copy the minidump files to another folder first. Then .rar or .zip them and attach to your next post.

Tews said:

vsmraid.sys is the VIA RAID DRIVER FOR AMD-X86-64. Go to VIA's support page and make sure that you have the latest version...

There is some variation of opinion (seen via lots of Googling) on what that means. I got v5.80G but vsmraid.sys seems to no longer be included. I'm open to suggestions...

I'm close to following one hint I saw and just deleting the driver. I =believe= (but can't verify) that it applies only to the Promise RAID on the MB, and I'm not using it. (Win 7 compatibility reports it as a known problem.)

A little more information. (a) I was not able to determine how to install or use the drivers on the CD that came with the motherboard. (b) I took a gig out and it still BSOD'd; I took a second out and it didn't (and it didn't matter which one was in). Because I can reproduce this by trying a full virus scan or even on occasion re-doing my Win7 performance score, I'm going to try to test my hard drive (WDC WD20) as well; I'd like to see the SMART data. Any suggestions on free stuff before I fork over for SpinRite?

Welll.... I guess I'll close this thread, at least for now. For completely unknown reasons, the gremlins went away. I am now running 4GB (4x1GB ... the same ones I started out with), memory hole enabled, and the system seems completely stable. I ran the comprehensive WD disk test using WinDLG 1.13 (after wasting time trying to get the current version 1.17 to work and discovering all the forum messages about how it doesn't work currently) which revealed no problems, and then SpeedFan 4.40 (which I couldn't get to see the drives until the author told me to run it in Admin mode) which also showed no problems. I didn't install any new software, drivers or otherwise, so who knows??