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RAID Controller causes bluescreens, error BCCode: 51
Just a quick backstory before I post the details.
I am currently living in Florida, and won't be back at home (Michigan) until the end of March. I built a computer to record TV shows, it's basically just standard hardware ($60 motherboard, some budget RAM sticks, an AMD Radeon 5570 video card, etc), with the Ceton InfiniTV tuner as its main component. Using a CableCARD from my cable service in Michigan, I can record up to 4 shows at once, and essentially use this computer as a giant DVR.
OS-wise, it's running Windows 7 Enterprise x64 with SP1. (Why Enterprise? I'm a TechNet member and have one of those Enterprise keys that can be activated 500 times, so I figured I'd use it for this. Why not, right?) All the TV recording functions are done through Windows Media Center.
Before about a month ago, it just had a couple of 2TB hard drives for storing my recordings. But given that I've had this computer for a couple years, the hard drives would fill up often and I had to keep moving my recordings to another computer. I had an external RAID storage device with about 12TB of combined storage, and stored my stuff on there. Until a few months ago, when I tried to add another hard drive to the array and the entire thing broke on me, due to it being a really cheap external enclosure.
After recovering what I could, I sold off the drives and got myself a set of 8 3TB Western Digital Red drives, as those are specially made for RAID storage. I figured it makes more sense to just store all of the files to the TV-recording machine, as that will ultimately save time in the long run when it comes to moving files around.
So I got myself a RAID card and some hotswap bays (so that my mother can easily swap drives out if they fail, since I won't be home most of the time) and set it all up.
However, ever since, the computer will blue-screen randomly and I can't figure out why.
The actual RAID hardware works fine. It sees all 8 hard drives, Windows shows the driver as working properly, and I can use the MegaRAID software to manage it. I've created a RAID5 array with 21TB, and can copy data to and from it. Using CrystalDiskMark, I can confirm that it has pretty normal read and write speeds for an array of that size.
When it does bluescreen, it gives me a "memory" error. As in, the main cause for that particular error is because of the memory. So I used both the Windows built-in RAM diagnostic, and Memtest x86+, and both of those came back fine with no errors. Considering that it never crashed before adding the RAID hardware, I would assume it has to 3do with the RAID card... but why? The drivers are installed properly and my computer can see the partition fine.
Here's some more info. The most recent bluescreen (Actually, this one shows as a registry error, not memory):
Here's one from the time before last, that shows MEMORY_MANAGEMENT like most of them:Code:012613-47517-01.dmp 1/26/2013 3:55:14 PM REGISTRY_ERROR 0x00000051 00000000`00000001 fffff8a0`0190b010 00000000`31ec7bdb 00000000`00000465 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 6.1.7601.17944 (win7sp1_gdr.120830-0333) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 C:\Windows\Minidump\012613-47517-01.dmp 4 15 7601 275,736
If anyone wants the .dmp files, I'd be happy to upload them. Using Nirsoft's tool, I can see a ton of the bluescreen history.Code:012413-47439-01.dmp 1/24/2013 12:20:23 AM MEMORY_MANAGEMENT 0x0000001a 00000000`00041287 00000000`00000030 00000000`00000000 00000000`00000000 ntoskrnl.exe ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 NT Kernel & System Microsoft® Windows® Operating System Microsoft Corporation 6.1.7601.17944 (win7sp1_gdr.120830-0333) x64 ntoskrnl.exe+7efc0 C:\Windows\Minidump\012413-47439-01.dmp 4 15 7601 275,736
But here's the really weird part. I have my computer set to automatically reboot when it bluescreens (you know, the default in Windows 7?), but yet it doesn't. My mom tells me that when it crashes, there is NOTHING on-screen (I've got a monitor hooked up to it so she can read off diagnostics if needed), that the light is green (meaning there's a signal, orange is no signal) but totally black. My friend suggested that the blue-screen itself crashed... is that possible? I've never heard of that.
If you guys could help me determine if this is some weird hardware defect, opposed to a driver or system problem, that would be appreciated.