Solved Blue Screen or Computer Freezes

[TurkeyInABox]

Hi everyone,

I hope someone here can help me out because i'm getting stuck trying to debug this issue.

Blue Screen Information:
A process or thread crucial to system operation has unexpectedly exited or been terminated.
Technical information:
*** STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003, 0xFFFFFA80190D3B30, 0xFFFFFA80190D3E10, 0xFFFFF800039D4510)

I have read that the dump log file should be stored in Windows/Minidumps/ folder or directly under the windows folder called MEMORY.DMP but there have never been any such file created in all my crashes even though i have changed the settings from kernal dump to minidump and back and forth.

Symptoms:
The computer gets blue screen or hangs within 0-60 minutes.
The problem has occured when i am webborwsing, watching video or gaming.

Observations:
When the computer hangs, the orange load button on the computer is lit up constantly suggesting the hardrive is working nonestop.
I did some monitoring of when a freeze occured, it seems that there is a spike in activity CPU and HD then it goes dead and shortly thereafter the HD load goes to 100% all the time, dipping down brefily to 98% really fast then back up again.
After blue screen occurs, the computer has a tendancy to set my set my bios setting incorrectly. Trying to select my sotrage drive to boot before my SSD main drive. This result in a "reboot and select proper boot device or insert boot media in selected boot device and press any key" message at startup and i have to enter bios and fix this by setting SSD disk to boot before my storage disk.

What i have tried:
* Opened up the computer to see if some cords where disconnected or loosely connected, reconnected and disconnected some of them.
* Checked all FANs was working and spinning.
* Disconnected DVD drive & Burner and reboot.
* Disconnected & Removed my storage HD.
* Ran memetst86+ overnight on RAM, passed 5 times without any errors.
* Ran chkdsk on my SSD disk with windows 7 installed.
* Tried backup from a previous dates 2 times.
* Done recovery 2 times, wiping any information on the SDD disk with windows and resetting to factory defaults.
* Plugged power cords directly into the walloutput, instead of going through extention coord with multiple connectors.
* Monitored any oveheating issues with speedFan when problem occured, everything was stable at around 30-60*C
* Updated Graphics drivers.
* Checked the event viewer, but cannot see any errors, warnings etc when the crash occurs. Can only see a Critical: Event ID: 41 Task category: (63) but all event data is 0. The error just indicates: The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first.

Computer spec:
Acer Predator G7760
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64 bit
Hardrives: (Main SSD) C400 MTFDDAK128MAN,
(Secondary): WDC WD20EARx-22PASB0
RAM: 4 x 4096M PC-3 10600 665MHz DDR3-1330 Samsung CH9
CPU: Intel i7 2600k cpu 3,4ghz
Graphics: 2 x NVIDIA Geforce GTX 580 (SLI configured)
ROCCAT mouse + keyboard

Here are my current memory & CPU settings, i have not changed them from default since i'm really not a HW guy:
RAM Memory Settings:
Memory Multiplyer: 13,33x
tCC: 9
tRCD: 9
tRP: 9
tRAS: 24
tRRD: 4
tWR: 10
tRTP: 5
tWTR: 5
tRFC: 107
tFAW: 20
Memory speed 1333MHz

CPU Settings:
Reference clock: 100MHz
Max none turbo boost ratio: 34x
Max none turbo boost cpu speed: 3400GHz
Max turbo boost cpu speed: 3800GHz
Enhanced intel speed technology: enabled
Intel turbo boost technology: enabled
Core current limit: 97,500A
Max turbo boost ratio: 38x
Additional turbo voltage: 0mV
Turbo boost short power max: enabled
Turbo boost power max: 95,000W
Turbo boost short power max: 118,750W

*Note: I have not installed any new HW or SW that i know of, problem just seemed to occur out of nowhere.

Please reply if you have any ideas.

 

[TurkeyInABox]

Hi again,
After countless more hours of debugging I seem to have things up and running stable now again.
What i did was install windows 7 on a new SSD disk which i wasn't using, tested using only that disk installed and everything worked fine, got no freeze or bluescreens.
I then added my storage drive, everything still working fine.
I'm planning to try to use the old SSD disk as storage now instead and see if it works, if not i'll just throw the disk away.
So i've removed all partitions from the old SSD disk, formated it and updated the firmware as suggested, hopfully it will work and not cause any more problems.
So to conculed it seems that there was somthing wrong with the SSD disk, i'm not sure what at this point could be the old firmware that was bugged or became incompatable.
So if you have problem like i posted above i suggest you:
a) Try to update your harddrive firmware.
b) if a doesn't solve anything, try removing the windows disk and install a clean windows on another disk and try running with that disk only.


As an extra note, i noticed that my bios was set up to run the disks in RAID mode when i was fiddeling with the firmware updates.
This seems to be the default setting, since i haven't got my disks RAID configured i decided to switch to AHCI instead which seems more reasonable. I'm not sure if this was contributing to my freezes and blue screens somehow as well.

Hope this helps anyone else out there.

 

[Capt.Jack Sparrow]

Thanks for posting your fix here. I'm sure this will help someone out.