New
#1
Rare BSOD became far too common
Attached the latest W7F Diagnostic zip. It all seems to have started on the 19/12/12, early in the morning when I turned the computer on before going to college. I logged in, then went to have my wash. On returning to the computer, it was magically back at the login screen. I didn't think much of it. It also seems to have happened on Christmas Day, and I wasn't at the computer at that time either. I had installed Skyrim that day, but had no issues with it in-game. The next incident wasn't until 31/1/13, more than a month later with almost 128 hours logged in Skyrim (I'd say between 110-120 with alt-tabbing), but I wasn't playing the game (I was using the Creation Kit, which hung on closing, which sparked a BSOD). On 1/2/13, no one was even in the house, and only Windows Explorer and the internet would have been open.
Cue me installing Dawnguard on the 2/2/13, and playing for 40 minutes in the afternoon. I came back in the evening, and couldn't even get 5 minutes without BSOD! That'd be the first dump file for 2/2/13. The second was upon reboot, I went back into the game, and I was only able to click 'Load' on my save for it to happen. I waited a few hours, tried again, got 5 minutes in the outside world before BSOD. The fourth instance on 2/2/13 is what is especially concerning - I was surfing the internet looking for information about the sudden onset of these BSOD events, and only had the internet running. Jump to 3/2/13, 5 minutes in-game and it happens, but then it happens when I get to the login screen. I simply type in the password, click OK...BSOD! The next incident was 7/2/13, and again just using the internet (my brother had spent ages trying to get the computer to properly boot up after using SeaTools for DOS...turns out he had to let the ISO complete fully and ctrl-alt-delete at the end, not simply reboot! That was a nail-biting twenty minutes figuring out why the computer refused to boot at all).
My system specs (should also be contained in the zip attached to my post)...
Windows 7 64-bit
AMD Athlon II X4 Processor (4 CPUs), ~3.0GHz
4096MB RAM
DirectX 11
NVIDIA GeForce GT 240
Driver version: 8.17.12.7061
There is a rather large red flag over the whole situation. Each time the computer boots up and shuts down (and dotted about during the day once or twice), there is a list of errors in Event Viewer for harddrive\dr0 has a bad block. SeaTools for Windows failed the main harddrive on all but the SMART test, and the DOS version failed it also and was unable to repair the errors (just three errors, but then that is more than enough). It goes all the way back to 22/9/12, when it appears there was an error with the file system structure on volume C becoming corrupt and unuseable. The computer appears to have attempted a repair, and states it was successful, but that's when the disk errors (with the code '7') started up. A new harddrive is on the way.
Add to all of this my installation of Maya - a file vital to the initialisation of the software got magically deleted. I never touched it, and neither did anyone else. It just...disappeared, and I couldn't launch Maya. Also, on the 28/1/13 the computer had an error pop-up stating 'Display driver NVIDIA Windows Kernel Mode Driver, Version 270.61 stopped responding and has successfully recovered'. The screen flashed black for a moment before this, and I haven't seen it appear since. Event Viewer states: Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding and has successfully recovered.
However, so far I have only able to get Skyrim to BSOD where it comes to games. I attempted Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl and Empire Total War. Now, is it possibly that the more the game calculates and reads from/writes to memory, the more likely it is to come across a bad block and error? I imagine Skyrim is more demanding than even Stalker on high graphics, and especially more than any Total War game on the campaign map. Plus it may have started to use the bad blocks when writing save data...
Anyone able to pitch in on the situation? I know that there are third party drivers that need updating or deleting, but until the full reinstall on Tuesday, there's no point to mucking about with those.