BSOD 116 when attempting to play games

   Warning

Before you proceed with the following, answer these two questions: Are you still under warranty? Does your warranty allow you to open up the machine to check hardware? If you are unsure of the answers to these questions, contact your system manufacturer. WARNING: The steps that follow can void your warranty!!!

Strip down your system to run only the bare essentials: one RAM module, the CPU, motherboard, one hard disk, one graphics card (or use onboard graphics if you have it), keyboard, mouse, and one monitor. See if you are then able to start Windows and run stable. If it is stable, add one piece of hardware back at a time until you get crashes again. Take notes of what hardware you add and how the system responds to the hardware changes.

As you add and remove hardware, follow these steps for ESD safety:

1. Shut down and turn off your computer.
2. Unplug all power supplies to the computer (AC Power then battery for laptops, AC power for desktops)
3. Hold down the power button for 30 seconds to close the circuit and ensure all power drains from components.
4. Make sure you are grounded by using proper grounding techniques, i.e. work on an anti-static workbench, anti-static desk, or an anti-static pad. Hold something metallic while touching it to the anti-static surface, or use an anti-static wristband to attach to the anti-static material while working.

Once these steps have been followed, it is safe to remove and replace components within your computer.

Well, I did get so far as to pull both GPUs and all my storage drives tonight and test and it made no difference. I cannot get down to one drive as I am running a Raid 0 system drive. It did get far enough in that the device manager popup said it was installing Windows, if that says anything. I also got another BSOD but haven't gotten around to grabbing it, but I'll save that for tomorrow and see if HBCD will last long enough to at least grab the code.

What device did Device Manager install?

I wonder if your RAID configuration is intact. RAID tends to degrade if there is any data corruption on the system. When was the last time you ran a Disk Check on your drives?

Windows 7 is rather finicky when it comes to RAID, so we generally do not recommend using it. There is also the general opinion in the technical circles that RAID is not a good idea for the average user: Why RAID is (usually) a Terrible Idea - Puget Custom Computers

It just said Windows and a reboot was required. I did run chkdsk when it first started intermittently acting up from command prompt with options /f /r /b just for redundancy, i know b>r>f. It never came back with any errors or relocated sectors.

Also, I have never had any problem with Raid0 before with 7 even before this last clean install. I did think that maybe one drive was failing so I switched my BIOS settings back to IDE mode and ran an bunch of different HDD tests from my HBCD drive to check since Raid0 doesn't seem to like S.M.A.R.T. But, none of those tests came back with any errors so I'm assuming the drives are okay.

Edit: So I tried booting my Ubuntu usb drive to shrink the partition on my 2tb drive so I could clone my raid0 partition over to it and I ran into a "Machine check error" after selecting the usb drive to boot from with the boot selection popup.

Did you switch back from IDE after running the hard disk tests?

Yes I switched back to RAID mode afterwards. Apparently it's a common problem with ASRock motherboards and warm boots trying to load that, a cold boot fixed that problem.

I'm thinking it was a bad driver or some hidden virus/malware as I finally got it to boot fine but as soon as I moved my mouse it would BSOD so I said f*** it and did another clean install and I'm slowly installing things one at a time trying to find out, and waiting for Avira's rescue cd to finish downloading because Avira said I had a hidden something that could only be fixed from the rescue cd.

The security experts sometimes recommend a CLEAN clean install. The additional step before the clean install is to run the clean all command through Diskpart: Disk - Clean and Clean All with Diskpart Command

Whenever I do a clean install I always DBAN first set on the DoD 5220.22-M setting. I think that's a little more thorough than the DiskPart command. I could just be paranoid as I Gutmann Wipe before I sell a hard drive.

In that case, any viruses should have been wiped through the clean install, so why is avira complaining?

I didn't wipe my storage drives, I just wiped the Raid array, so maybe something there...