BSOD - Cause?

[lenlennart]

Hi guys,

i keep having issues with my PC.. dunno what the problem is. Hope you can help me!

Recently i upgraded my PC (i5 750, Asus P7P55D LE, HD 5770). I kept my 330W PSU and harddrives. I did a clean install of Win7 and everything seemed to be fine. However, after a couple days, win7 started and kept crashing. I had a hard time getting even into windows.

So i formated again, but same story - after a couple days it became very unstable. I even had graphical errors in Halflife 2 and Warcraft 3 kept crashing. Once it crashed, i kept on doing it continuously, like in a loop. Attached is a minidump 2 sequal crashes of win7.

Somone already had a look at those 2 minidumps (thanks zigzag!):

013110-15272-01.dmp    1/31/2010 8:58:50 PM    NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM     0x00000024    00000000`001904fb    fffff880`02347a78     fffff880`023472d0    fffff880`014f6173    Ntfs.sys     Ntfs.sys+c6173                    x64         C:\Users\K\Desktop\013110-15272-01.dmp    4    15    7600    
013110-16005-01.dmp    1/31/2010 9:02:42 PM     SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION    0x0000003b    00000000`c000001d     fffff880`02db2da7    fffff880`06159ea0    00000000`00000000     bowser.sys    bowser.sys+12da7                    x64         C:\Users\K\Desktop\013110-16005-01.dmp    4    15    7600

So a couple days ago i decided to try XP 64bit. In the setup, it told me my harddrive was broken and i had to recrate the partition in order to get it to work (seems the win7 setup did a pretty sloppy job on formating). This seemed to have fix the BSODs.

But then yesterday i tried to watch a yotube 1080p video... and guess what, looping BSODs....


I had memtest86+ running for 12 hours straight already with no errors. Also Prime95 ran for a couple hours; so did FurMark.

However, what i found out was that when i run memtest straight after a BSOD, so no switching off power, i get a quadrillion errors in the very first test!! But once power is switched off so that RAM is cleared, memtest runs fine for hours....

So question is: what causes the initial crash? Is the RAM the actual cause or just a symptom of something else going terribly wrong? Is it the Graphicscard causing this (becuase of graphical erros and crashed with 1080p)? Or is windows going crazy?

Really hope you can help me!!

Thanks a mill,
Lennart

 

[lenlennart]

hmm can someone help me analyse the XP minidumps then?

 

[usasma]

Please completely fill your your System Specs so we can figure out what we're dealing with here. In particular, a 330 watt power supply with a new (or nearly so) motherboard and CPU makes me suspect power issues - but we can't tell that without complete system specs.

Also, please post this info:

MSINFO32:
Please go to Start and type in "msinfo32.exe" (without the quotes) and press Enter
Save the report as an .nfo file, then zip up the .nfo file and upload/attach the .zip file with your next post.

If you're having difficulties with the format, please open an elevated (Run as administrator) Command Prompt and type "msinfo32 /nfo C:\Users\Public\Desktop\TEST.NFO" (without the quotes) and press Enter. Then navigate to the C:\Users\Public\Desktop directory to retrieve the TEST.NFO file. If you have difficulties with making this work, please post back.

The XP dumps point to USB stuff, the Win7 dumps seem to point to either NTFS.SYS or a System Service

I'd start with these hardware tests AFTER ruling out the anemic PSU as the cause:

H/W Diagnostics:
Please start by running these bootable hardware diagnostics:
Memory Diagnostics (read the details at the link)
HD Diagnostic (read the details at the link)

Also, please run one of these free, independent online malware scans to ensure that your current protection hasn't been compromised: Malware (read the details at the link)

 

[lenlennart]

Hi usama,

thanks for your answer! Well the PSU was my first idea too... but those crashes seem to accur too random, mostly when there is no load. My Volts are all stable and simiular systems are reported to run with 250W max.

Its interesting that you point out the NTSC as Win7 crahes and USB as WinXP. As is said, winXP had trouble with the NTSC-filesystem created by win7 (and this does not seem to be a known issue). On my WinXP, i had to install a HP beta driver in order to get my printer to work.


Might it be the case that those crahes are completly independent of each other and have nothing to do with the RAM at all?
But on the other hand... how come i get millions of errors in memtest86 directly after a crash then?


btw: the crashing youtube 1080p vid just played for me...

 

[usasma]

Yes, it's possible that the crashes are independent of each other - but unlikely IMO.

I'm glad that others are able to run with only 250 watt.
Based on my experience, 330 watt PSU's are likely to cause this type of error - but I have no way to prove it without replacing the PSU.

 

[lenlennart]

hmm, seems to have been the RAM! Got a replacement and everyting works just fine...

was really werd thou, since it passed MemText for 12hours straight...
Anyways, thanks!