conputer freezing even in safe mode

flamer · 02 Dec 2013

It started happening last night. Came home computer was locked up. Reboot it and 20 mins later it would lock up no bsod just full locked with some artifacts on the screen. Similar thing would happen in safe mode except it would reboot itself.

Still happening now except much more frequent and sometimes I get a bsod.

Specs:
Win7 ultimate 64
And fx am2
8 gig ram
1x ssd with just windows
2x HDD in raid 0.
2x gfx cards running separately to each other.

I should note i can see all the files on all drives correctly which makes me think its not a drive failures

flamer · 02 Dec 2013

Ran memtest for a few cycles. No errors. Ran SFC /scannow it said it found errors and fixed them all but still crashed after that.

Scheduled a chkdsk to happen at next boot, the chkdsk got up to 25% before the system froze.

I have booted a live Linux CD. No issues using the cd. trying to figure out hwo to run a chkdsk from within linux. It doesn't seem to like my ssd.

I can't get into windows for more than 3 minutes now before a BSOD or freeze. thats normal mode and safe mode.

YoYo155 · 03 Dec 2013

Hi flamer :) .

--Just to clarify you shouldn't run check disk on an SSD, as it might lock-up the drive.

The bug checks are 0xF4 which are attributed to storage related issues.
Your description of the problem is inline with faulty storage device, mostly the freezing,
that combined with the fact the the SSD is low capacity only means the NAND will deteriorate
faster where continuous writes has less flash to occupy. The drive is also listed as EOL (end of life)
on OCZ's website, either way I strongly advise you backup and data you can't afford to lose.

How old is the drive?

Check if it has the latest firmware installed.

Download OCZ Toolbox and Firmware Updates

To cover all the bases I suggest you do the following, (it might be a different cause):

Replace the SATA Data cable, as well as the SATA Power.
Remove your secondary GPU to eliminate an additional failure point.

flamer · 03 Dec 2013

Thanks for the reply YoYo155,

Heres an update, the the crashes were happening so frequently I couldn't do much, so I booted OCZ toolbox disc, and updated the firmware. Once that was done it booted much more stable, however windows epxlorer would keep crashing, so I booted into safe mode and ran a full scan with MSE. This time no freezes or restarts for the 7 hours it took to run. it found a trojan which it removed. after that I booted into normal mode and everything was great, I reinstalled the GPU drivers. removed a few other bits of unneeded startup software etc and installed all the latest windows updates, I had 600mb worth

I was running in normal mode for a couple of hours (It had never lasted that long without a BSOD previously) But unfortunately It suffered another BSOD at random, with the exact same code F4. I havent turned the system on since, but I suspect the same thing is going to happen.

The drive itself has nothing on it exact the windows install, everything else is on an hdd RAID including user profiles. So Losing the drive is not going to be a huge issue, except I am just not sure how some applications will work if they are already installed on a second drive but not present in the registry etc. I think its going to turn into quite a mess :)

YoYo155 · 03 Dec 2013

Thanks for the update :).
Well if there was one trojan, it's likely there are more.

Please scan for possible infection and file corruption.

Download TDSS-Killer and scan for rootkits.
Download Kaspersky Rescue CD and scan for other types of infections. (a how-to tutorial)
Download Malwarebytes and DON'T activate the trail (uncheck the box at the end of the installation)
Follow this tutorial on how to use the SFC/ SCANNOW tool in Windows.

(*Kaspersky Rescue CD from a USB thumbdrive)