BSOD ---no pattern detectable

[ampdesign]

My desktop Dell XPS 9100 64bit win7 studio has been going to sleep and not waking up. Now I am getting the occasional BSOD. The other day it went to sleep and shutdown then started beeping and start up button that is usually blue white turned yellow and started blinking. 2 BSOD's followed. Reboot seems to work OK today but when will the next BSOD happen. Need some assistance please. Dmp file attached as instructed. Thanks.

 

[ampdesign]

anyone? machine just crashed and restarted after booting up and login. I think my box is preparing for a catastrophic fail.

 

[carwiz]

Did your problem start after installing the Nvidia driver or was the install an attempt to fix earlier BSODs? Have you made any modifications to the hardware system? Are you overclocking the system? Along with a video driver timeout, it looks like you're having problems with a PCIe channel. Also, the video driver you installed (9/21) is being flagged as incorrect.

Start with the simple things first and clean the PC of all (most) dust on the inside. After you've cleaned it, reseat the video card (Remove and Reinstall).

 

[ampdesign]

Did your problem start after installing the Nvidia driver or was the install an attempt to fix earlier BSODs? Have you made any modifications to the hardware system? Are you overclocking the system? Along with a video driver timeout, it looks like you're having problems with a PCIe channel. Also, the video driver you installed (9/21) is being flagged as incorrect.

Start with the simple things first and clean the PC of all (most) dust on the inside. After you've cleaned it, reseat the video card (Remove and Reinstall).

@carwiz--it crashed a couple of times before the Nvidia driver install. About 6 weeks ago it began to go to black screen and lock-up when it went to sleep/inactive. Also, sometimes it would simply try to reboot and then lock-up when I was in the middle of routine operations. It's been difficult to detect a pattern I have to say. Anyway, I think the dust cleaning idea is appropriate. That thought has crossed my mind. I'll take care of that and assess. My thinking is that its a graphics card issue possibly. I've been working the hell out of it for renderings. Thanks for responding.

 

[YoYo155]

Before we go into a debugging frenzy, your case of the PC not booting and showing an amber light
instead of the white healthy one around the power switch is attributed to "heavy" power drawing devices
plugged into the USB ports, first try and disconnect any device apart from the necessity i.e. keyboard and mouse.
Let us know how things fair then we will choose the correct path .

 

[ampdesign]

Before we go into a debugging frenzy, your case of the PC not booting and showing an amber light
instead of the white healthy one around the power switch is attributed to "heavy" power drawing devices
plugged into the USB ports, first try and disconnect any device apart from the necessity i.e. keyboard and mouse.
Let us know how things fair then we will choose the correct path .

@YoYo155---not sure I can remember precisely but I might have had a set of wireless BT earbuds charging and a minidrive attached to USB at time of crash. I had been suspicious that the USB ports located at the top of the machine might be involved with the crashes. There is also a BT key in one of the ports. I'm not sure that these are drawing a lot of power. I think that the crash has taken place when nothing other than the BT key was plugged in to the ports as well. Still puzzled as the machine spontaneously rebooted again today.

 

[ampdesign]

Checked all of the previous suggestions but the issue is getting worse. Machine continues to go reboot when I start it. Also the start button turns yellow at times and beeps. Had a couple of BSODs earlier in the day. Managed to boot it up but the boot up was really slow taking 5 times longer than usual to resolve graphics on desktop. During one of the reboots I did an F12 hard drive -DST Short test and came up with evidence of FAIL Error code 2000-0146. I am very perplexed about what is going on as the failures are not consistent. As mentioned I am getting everything from BSOD's to recurring spontaneous reboots. I have also noticed the cooling fan seems to be working much harder than normal and also have noticed that upon shutting down the fan will speed up suddenly before it shuts off. I really need some help with this

 

[YoYo155]

Checked all of the previous suggestions but the issue is getting worse. Machine continues to go reboot when I start it. Also the start button turns yellow at times and beeps. Had a couple of BSODs earlier in the day. Managed to boot it up but the boot up was really slow taking 5 times longer than usual to resolve graphics on desktop. During one of the reboots I did an F12 hard drive -DST Short test and came up with evidence of FAIL Error code 2000-0146. I am very perplexed about what is going on as the failures are not consistent. As mentioned I am getting everything from BSOD's to recurring spontaneous reboots. I have also noticed the cooling fan seems to be working much harder than normal and also have noticed that upon shutting down the fan will speed up suddenly before it shuts off. I really need some help with this

This right there is already raises a red flag about the storage health, I would backup the data
to an external storage as fast as possible!
Is the system still within the warranty period?

As for the bugchecks, one of them is a 0x116 (TDR) which is basically the GPU could not be controlled anymore, it froze for a certain amount of time and the system noticed it is, tried to recover it but failed to do so.
But I'm more interested in the second which 0x124 with a first parameter of 4, hardware fault on the
PCI-Express bus.
The hardware level errors are more of an issue and taking into account what you're describing it seems
that the main issue is the GPU.

Test for thermals and stability;

• Download Speccy and post a Screenshot of the summary window, one at idle and another while putting load on the PC using Prime95 for the CPU side and Furmark for the GPU.

Please fill out this form and post back the result:

• Power Supply Calculator

Good practice, open up the case and re-seat all types of connection.

• SATA Cables (HDD/SSD/ODD).
• SATA-Power.
• Motherboard 24-pin.
• Motherboard 4/8-pin (CPU).
• Re-seat the RAM.
• Re-seat the GPU.

Make sure that every slot / cable head is free of dust or other obstruction.
Make sure that every connection is seating properly and firmly in-place.

   Warning

The Following Method Should NOT Be Performed On An SSD!

Testing the HDD:

1. Perform a Disk Check | Disk Check
2. Then Post the results following | THIS METHOD
3. Download SeaTools for DOS if you don't want to use a CD to test the HDD you can use YUMI – Multiboot USB Creator to create a bootable USB (instructions are found at the bottom of both pages).
4. If SeaTools for Windows is unable to recognize your HDD visit HDDdiag and follow the instructions.

If SeaTools For DOS does not recognize the drive;
Boot into the BIOS using the *Fx key.
Look for an entry called SATA Mode (or something similar), it should be set to IDE / AHCI.
It's probably set to AHCI which is why SeaTools doesn't recognize them in the DOS environment.
Set it to IDE then save and exit usually by pressing the F10 key.
Now boot into SeaTools and it should detect the drives.
Start the Long Test and let it run.
Upon completion don't try to boot into Windows as it will only result in a BSOD, go back into the BIOS
and change the SATA setting back to what it was in the first place.

• *Popular BIOS access keys.

Post back with the results .