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BSOD's, crashes and delays in being able to boot into Bios
I have a 2 and a half year old HP Pavilion P7-1020 desktop with the following specs:
Motherboard H-Alvorix-RS880-uATX
Chipset: AMD 785G (integrated ATI Radeon HD 4200 video)
Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 960T quad core
Ram: Hynix 8 gig (2 sticks of 4 gig) non ECC DDR3-1333 in slots 3 & 4 (dual channel architecture)
Integrated ALC888S-VD audio
802.11 Wireless b/g/n PCI-E Mini card
PCI Realtek RTL8105E
1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm HD (just installed)
500w Corsair Modular PSU (just installed)
OS - Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit)
The full computer info is located here:
HP Pavilion p7-1020 Desktop PC | HP® Support
About 3 weeks ago, the computer started crashing with BSOD's, and frozen screens which would turn into a jumble of blue and white. Quite often, after these crashes, I couldn't even boot into bios for 15 minutes. The Memtest86 tests I've run show no errors. although I didn't run 10 passes like some here recommend. I ran about 2.5 passes for 3+ hours. I also have used a video graphics memory test from a Hirens boot CD and that also showed no errors. A WD HD diagnostic of the old WD disk didn't show any bad sectors.
Eventually I decided to use the HP recovery disks (burned from the old hard drive with the HP utility several months after I first started the computer), but after choosing recovery, I realized that their recovery meant reformatting the entire hard drive and wiping all my files. I stopped it after 4% and lost the boot record in the process. The Testdisk utility indicated my files are still there but it will take some time to restore them.
I've since replaced the PSU and HDD, thinking that might be the problem. However, I've tried two Windows 7 re-installs from the the HP recovery disks and both times the system crashed during online Windows updates. Usually, I still can't even boot into Bios for 10-15 minutes after these crashes.
Before and after I installed the new PSU and HDD, during the crashes, the power light always stayed on, as did the motherboard power light. However, when the computer crashes, there is no HDD indicator light, and that won't show activity until I can boot into Bios again.
Here's the strange thing. I'm able to run a live Linux Mint DVD for over 5 hours with no problem. It does freeze on occasion, but the screen retains the last image and doesn't go black like in a Windows crash (BSOD turns to a black screen). I mounted the HDD partitions, surfed the net, watched live streaming videos, downloaded rescue disks and a large 3 gig Digital River Windows 7 ISO file, all while in Linux from a live disk. This was all after a number of Windows 7 crashes. However, if I try to run the Kaspersky Rescue CD, Bitdefender Rescue CD, and F-secure rescue CD (all based on Linux), they all crash. The system crashes before the live Kaspersky CD can fully load. Dr. Web's Cure It Live CD found a TrojanDownloader.9 in an IE5 subdirectory file called Amddriverdownloader[1].exe. When I clicked on delete and CureIT, the system froze! F-Secure crashes about 60% of the way through a live CD scan.
I've tried flashing the Bios with the latest update, and updating all the hardware drivers. I find that a big problem with the HP website is that their forums aren't really moderated by pros and the pages that contain driver and firmware updates are very out of date. The descriptions for the files are even mislabeled in some instances.
I'm not sure it this is a hardware or software problem that has to do with bad drivers. Could it be some hard to find malware that may have gotten into the mobo Bios?
Attached is a zip file of my recent minidumps. I tried looking at it using Nirsoft's Blue View utility, but I'm currently using an old Dell with Win 2000 on it, and other than showing the kernel file info, the program uses Windows 2000 to base its findings.
Today, I was able to boot the computer into safe mode and run Kaspersky's TDSS rootkit utility. No rootkits were found. However, I couldn't run your utility as the system would crash too soon. I do have a zip file of the minidumps I've saved.which I'm uploading. Since this last install has been so compromised by crashes during updates, I decided to run Darik's Boot and Nuke to wipe the drive before any other reinstall, and it crashed after about 5%.
This may be important - I also discovered recently that the AMD 785g northbridge chipset heatsink which is attached by clips to the motherboard no longer is glued to the chip (the adhesive has worn off) and gets very hot to the touch. I think this chipset contains the built in ATI Radeon HD 4200 graphics. I'm wondering if the heat from this is shutting down the system and causing the Bios boot delays of 10 minutes or more (waiting for the chip to cool off?). I ordered some Arctic Silver Ceramique and cleaner to take care of that.
If it's not too much trouble, perhaps someone could take a look at my minidumps before I install another version of Windows 7 next week. I tried using the forum diagnostic tool but by the time I was able to attach a thumb drive to save the file, the system crashed in Windows. My next install, after applying thermal paste to the northbridge chipset, will be a version of Windows 7, but this time from the Digital River iso downloads available.