New
#1
BSOD After connecting to VPN (details inside)
Hello,
A little background:
Around a year ago I had signed up for Private Internet Access, which installs the TAP9 driver (OpenVPN I believe). I started to get blue screens on my machine (Win7 Ultimate x64), so I installed it on a 2nd Windows machine (identical OS). Same thing. As soon as I started the VPN, blue screen. I installed VirtualBox VM software, same thing on both machines. After trying various things, I ended up sending the motherboard back to ASRock (It was a Z87 Professional). They found nothing wrong, but I ended up doing a fresh install of Win7 and everything was great for about a year. Then I started having machine lockups and found out that my SSDs (Samsung 840 EVOs) were victim to the slowdowns that a lot of people were complaining about. I tried upgrading the firmware and running their "fix", then the blue screens started to happen again, this time at random times. Removed the drives, did a fresh install onto some WD Black drives, and everything was working fine. I thought the motherboard had finally crapped out as even with the onboard LAN ports, the network icon would end up with a yellow exclamation mark after about 5 minutes of usage. I had to use an add-on card to get it to work, so I decided to just build a pretty much brand new system.
I just built it today:
ASRock Extreme6/ac / Intel i7-5930K (brand new)
32Gb G.skill DDR4 (new)
Samsung 850 Pro (apparently these drives did not have the same problems as the 840s) (new)
2 EVGA 780 Tis in SLI (cannibalized from my old machine)
Everything was going well.
I installed the 2 old SSDs (750Gb 840 EVOs) and I went to install the OpenVPN driver via PrivateInternetAccess. Connect to the VPN, boom, same Blue screen as I was getting on the old machine some time ago (ndis.sys, see attachment). The prior Blue screens were definitely not ndis.sys related, as they looked to be hard disk related (it could not even write the minidump file).
So, I am dumbfounded at the moment, wondering if my router could be causing the blue screens? I have a WNDR3700 that's in front of my Verizon FIOS router (it's being treated as the DMZ host). The only thing that was the same was the video cards and even in the old machine I had a 680 GTX before the 780 Tis so I'm not convinced that would be the problem. That and the fact that my former 2nd machine (it's since gone over to being a linux server) had the same issues a year or so ago (same router) makes me want to believe it's the router, but before I trash it I'd like to get some expert advice from you guys.
Attached are 3 separate crashes, the first with both old 840 SSDs attached, then 1 of them, then the final one with just the new 850 EVO Pro, so as to eliminate the drives as the cause (a chkdisk /r /f on them seemed to hang, so I just disconnected them).
Thanks for taking the time to read. I probably missed some details, so please ask any questions you have. Thank you!
Quote