ntoskrnl.exe crash Windows 7, a plea for help

MisterDobalina · 25 Dec 2010

Situational Update 12/30/10: So far with the assistance of zigzag3143 and CarlTR6 we have managed to rule out the following hardware: Processor, Hard Drive, Graphics Card, and RAM. We have deduced that it is a hardware error judging by the information provided in the dumps, we just aren't sure what particular piece. If anyone has any speculation as to why my system runs perfectly fine under stress tests, but crashes while playing games, please weigh in. Furthermore, if there is any speculation as to why it is crashing on certain games such as Team Fortress 2, Borderlands, Bad Company 2, and Half Life 2 Deathmatch, but not Assassin's Creed II, Metro 2033, Wolfenstein, Need for Speed Shift, Resident Evil 5 or GRID, please provide that as well. Thank you all once again. Hopefully together we will be able to fix this. Maybe it will be something so simple, it's stupid. xD

My original post continues from here onward:

Hello everyone,

I need your help with an issue I've been having with my computer. The situation, is that while playing games like Team Fortress 2, Bad Company 2, Half Life 2 Deathmatch, and Borderlands, my computer likes to randomly crash. The crash goes as such, the game freezes and immediately my speakers start buzzing (the buzzing depends on whether or not a sound was playing at the time of the crash). This persists until the system reboots itself. I am not greeted by a Blue Screen of Death to my frustration, the system merely restarts itself (rather rudely, I think). This issue comes and goes as it pleases. I've had periods of days, weeks and even a whole month and a half without crashing, but inevitably the issue returns no matter what I do. What's strange though, is that I have yet to experience a single crash while playing Assassin's Creed II.

I have reinstalled the operating system once back in September, ran checkdsk, Memtest 86+, Prime95 and sat through several hours of the Heaven Benchmarking tool to no crashes. I've even RMA'd my graphics card and AMD said there's nothing wrong with it. As far as my RAM, Hard Drive, Processor and GPU are concerned, there's nothing wrong with them. The system can idle for hours and hours on end and not crash. The crashes persisted even while I had anti-virus software (I'm just too lazy to reinstall it.) It's really a perplexing puzzle for me, and I'd greatly appreciate your assistance in this. I usually take it upon myself to debug and fix errors on my computers, but this one is out of my scope.

My system specs are as follows:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM for system builders)
ASUS M4A79XTD EVO
Diamond Radeon HD5870, latest bios and drivers
Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA hard drive
AMD Phenom II x4 945 processor @ 3ghz stock
8GB OCZ PC3-12800 DDR3-1600 (For some reason it's pushed down to 1067 in the bios, I don't know what's up with that, but it might be a clue. My guess is the processor is limiting it.)
Coolmax 700W PSU
Antec Nine-Hundred Two

The system is under a year old, purchased and assembled in February of this year. This issue started around 3-4 months after everything was settled in, conveniently out of short term return warranty. I went back in the original memory dumps, which I may still have around here somewhere in text format, and compared their dates to the dates listed in the Add/Remove Programs menu before I reinstalled my operating system. Nothing lined up definitively as being the issue.

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just really frustrated with this issue. Makes me wonder why I spent so much money. Please notify me if I overlooked anything in my post or the zip file.

Thank you so much in advance,

Regards,

Jarrod.

P.S Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

zigzag3143 · 25 Dec 2010

MisterDobalina said:

Hello everyone,

I need your help with an issue I've been having with my computer. The situation, is that while playing games like Team Fortress 2, Bad Company 2, Half Life 2 Deathmatch, and Borderlands, my computer likes to randomly crash. The crash goes as such, the game freezes and immediately my speakers start buzzing (the buzzing depends on whether or not a sound was playing at the time of the crash). This persists until the system reboots itself. I am not greeted by a Blue Screen of Death to my frustration, the system merely restarts itself (rather rudely, I think). This issue comes and goes as it pleases. I've had periods of days, weeks and even a whole month and a half without crashing, but inevitably the issue returns no matter what I do. What's strange though, is that I have yet to experience a single crash while playing Assassin's Creed II.

I have reinstalled the operating system once back in September, ran checkdsk, Memtest 86+, Prime95 and sat through several hours of the Heaven Benchmarking tool to no crashes. I've even RMA'd my graphics card and AMD said there's nothing wrong with it. As far as my RAM, Hard Drive, Processor and GPU are concerned, there's nothing wrong with them. The system can idle for hours and hours on end and not crash. The crashes persisted even while I had anti-virus software (I'm just too lazy to reinstall it.) It's really a perplexing puzzle for me, and I'd greatly appreciate your assistance in this. I usually take it upon myself to debug and fix errors on my computers, but this one is out of my scope.

My system specs are as follows:
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (OEM for system builders)
ASUS M4A79XTD EVO
Diamond Radeon HD5870, latest bios and drivers
Seagate Barracuda 500GB SATA hard drive
AMD Phenom II x4 945 processor @ 3ghz stock
8GB OCZ PC3-12800 DDR3-1600 (For some reason it's pushed down to 1067 in the bios, I don't know what's up with that, but it might be a clue. My guess is the processor is limiting it.)
Coolmax 700W PSU
Antec Nine-Hundred Two

The system is under a year old, purchased and assembled in February of this year. This issue started around 3-4 months after everything was settled in, conveniently out of short term return warranty. I went back in the original memory dumps, which I may still have around here somewhere in text format, and compared their dates to the dates listed in the Add/Remove Programs menu before I reinstalled my operating system. Nothing lined up definitively as being the issue.

Sorry for the wall of text, I'm just really frustrated with this issue. Makes me wonder why I spent so much money. Please notify me if I overlooked anything in my post or the zip file.

Thank you so much in advance,

Regards,

Jarrod.

P.S Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year.

You have one of the biggest causes of BSOD's on computers. asacpi.sys in the 2005 version (which you have) almost always crashes. remove and replace

ASACPI.sys Sun Mar 27 22:30:36 2005

The 2005 version of this driver is a known BSOD cause.
Please visit this link: ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Support- download_item_mkt
Scroll down to the Utilities category, then scroll down to the "ATK0110 driver for WindowsXP/Vista/Windows 7 32&64-bit " (it's about the 8th item down).
Download and install it.
Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers to check and make sure that the ASACPI.sys file is date stamped from 2009 or 2010 (NOT 2005).

If that doesn fix it your hardware is also causing some problems.

Your .dmp file shows a stop error of 0x124 which is a general hardware error .. A "stop 0x124" is fundamentally different to many other types of bluescreens because it stems from a hardware complaint. Stop 0x124 minidumps contain very little practical information, and it is therefore necessary to approach the problem as a case of hardware in an unknown state of distress. You can read more on this error and what to try here... Stop 0x124 - what it means and what to try Stop 0x124 - what it means and what to try

Thanks

Ken J

MisterDobalina · 25 Dec 2010

I sincerely hope this isn't a fundamental hardware error. I don't know if I can afford to start purchasing replacement parts.

I installed the ATK0110 driver, and will be testing out my system to see if it crashes. Luckily, that merely requires playing TF2 or something. I'll be back with results most likely tomorrow in the afternoon.

Thank you for your help, Ken. Your insights are greatly appreciated. Nothing I would ever have seen on my own.

MisterDobalina · 26 Dec 2010

To my dismay, it appears this is a hardware issue. My most recent crash was a 0x124 stop error.

I believe I have successfully excluded the GPU, CPU and Hard Drive, but I will conduct more stress tests on them. As for the RAM, I will be running Memtest 86+ overnight for however many passes it cares to make barring any power interruptions by the snow storm outside. I'm not sure how to test my power supply, but I'm confident it's not the issue. As for the motherboard and the blu-ray drive, I guess it will take a bit more research. Any tips would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure if this is relevant, but I have also noticed an issue with the Power Button on my computer. Sometimes when I press it, instead of powering down like normal, the screen goes black and the fans rev up to stock speeds. This is usually followed by me holding the power button to force a shutdown.

CarlTR6 · 26 Dec 2010

Try updating this driver also and see if that helps:

Rt64win7.sys Thu Feb 26 04:04:13 2009 - Realtek 8101E/8168/8169 Network Driver Interface Specification 6.20 64-bit Driver. Latest PCIe GBE (GigaBit Ethernet) drivers here: Realtek.

MisterDobalina · 28 Dec 2010

I updated the driver you recommended Carl, and it seems to have helped somewhat. My computer hasn't crashed since, but I'm not convinced it's fixed completely. Just today while running through Borderlands, my computer seized as if it were going to crash, speakers buzzing and everything, but it did not. It somehow managed to recover. I noticed my HDD indicator light was flickering like crazy. Is it possible I'm dealing with faulty mechanics within the hard disk drive? Could that explain why I was never greeted with a formal BSOD because the hard drive locked up completely, or some mutation of that?

I hope it's just the disk, that's not really an expensive piece of hardware to replace. Any other insights are appreciated.

Update: The driver fixes appear to be ineffective. I experienced yet another crash with a 0x124 bug check code. I don't think this is a software issue at all. Thoughts? Any help is greatly appreciated.

CarlTR6 · 28 Dec 2010

I am glad that it helped. I agree with ZigZag, you may have a hardware problem. Run Check Disk on the drive containing your OS. Then run it on any other drive(s) you have.

Run CHKDSK /R /F from an elevated (Run as adminstrator) Command Prompt. Please do this for each hard drive on your system.
When it tells you it can't do it right now - and asks you if you'd like to do it at the next reboot - answer Y (for Yes) and press Enter. Then reboot and let the test run. It may take a while for it to run, but keep an occasional eye on it to see if it generates any errors. See "CHKDSK LogFile" below in order to check the results of the test.

Elevated Command Prompt:
Go to Start and type in "cmd.exe" (without the quotes)
At the top of the Search Box, right click on Cmd.exe and select "Run as administrator"

CHKDSK LogFile:
Go to Start and type in "eventvwr.msc" (without the quotes) and press Enter
Expand the Windows logs heading, then select the Application log file entry.
Double click on the Source column header.
Scroll down the list until you find the Chkdsk entry (wininit for Windows 7).

Copy/paste the results into your next post.

MisterDobalina · 28 Dec 2010

I have also exported the log as a Log File, if you would like me to attach that as well for your review.

Log Name: Application
Source: Microsoft-Windows-Wininit
Date: 12/28/2010 2:49:03 PM
Event ID: 1001
Task Category: None
Level: Information
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: JarrodGamingPC
Description:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
284416 file records processed.
File verification completed.
128 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
45 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
348210 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
284416 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Cleaning up 73 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 73 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 73 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
31898 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
35868424 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
284400 files processed.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
75530921 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.
488282111 KB total disk space.
185643840 KB in 245293 files.
113696 KB in 31899 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
400891 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
302123684 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
122070527 total allocation units on disk.
75530921 allocation units available on disk.
Internal Info:
00 57 04 00 d3 3a 04 00 6d b2 07 00 00 00 00 00 .W...:..m.......
63 01 00 00 2d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 c...-...........
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.
Event Xml:
<Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event">
<System>
<Provider Name="Microsoft-Windows-Wininit" Guid="{206f6dea-d3c5-4d10-bc72-989f03c8b84b}" EventSourceName="Wininit" />
<EventID Qualifiers="16384">1001</EventID>
<Version>0</Version>
<Level>4</Level>
<Task>0</Task>
<Opcode>0</Opcode>
<Keywords>0x80000000000000</Keywords>
<TimeCreated SystemTime="2010-12-28T19:49:03.000000000Z" />
<EventRecordID>7579</EventRecordID>
<Correlation />
<Execution ProcessID="0" ThreadID="0" />
<Channel>Application</Channel>
<Computer>JarrodGamingPC</Computer>
<Security />
</System>
<EventData>
<Data>
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.
CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
284416 file records processed.
File verification completed.
128 large file records processed.
0 bad file records processed.
0 EA records processed.
45 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
348210 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
0 unindexed files scanned.
0 unindexed files recovered.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
284416 file SDs/SIDs processed.
Cleaning up 73 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 73 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 73 unused security descriptors.
Security descriptor verification completed.
31898 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
35868424 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
284400 files processed.
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
75530921 free clusters processed.
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.
488282111 KB total disk space.
185643840 KB in 245293 files.
113696 KB in 31899 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
400891 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
302123684 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
122070527 total allocation units on disk.
75530921 allocation units available on disk.
Internal Info:
00 57 04 00 d3 3a 04 00 6d b2 07 00 00 00 00 00 .W...:..m.......
63 01 00 00 2d 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 c...-...........
00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................
Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.
</Data>
</EventData>
</Event>

CarlTR6 · 28 Dec 2010

It looks like your hard drive is fine. Check Disk cleaned up your file system and found no bad clusters. It is a good idea to run check dis a couple of times a year as preventive maintenance. If it starts showing bad clusters, that could indicate your hard drive is beginning to fail.

Let us know how Memtest does. Run it from a cold boot after your computer has been off for an hour or two.

MisterDobalina · 28 Dec 2010

I ran MemTest 86+ last night, letting it go for around 13-14 hours to make 6 solid passes with no errors. It's not a problem to try again though.

I've been tracking down the time of my crashes in the event viewer to see what Windows was recording at the time of the crash. I've come up with a few strange events that correspond roughly with the crash times (within second/seconds of the minidump). The details have all read the same:

"The EventSystem sub system is suppressing duplicate event log entries for a duration of 86400 seconds. The suppression timeout can be controlled by a REG_DWORD value named SuppressDuplicateDuration under the following registry key: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\EventSystem\EventLog."

Could this be an indication as to what may be going wrong, or am I merely grasping at straws? Is there a way I can view what the event log that was being suppressed was?

I'll probably be running MemTest 86+ again tonight just for the hell of it. If anything it will finally rule out my RAM as the suspect.