BSOD: System Service Exception, Random Occurrences

[Woody89]

Nothing on the short scan (as in, it wouldn't scan, "Possibly due to an error or bad sector"), so ran full scan, and it said I had three errors. As I don't have a Sea Tools HDD it didn't fix them. We may be closing in on the cause of my problems...

 

[essenbe]

It looks like it, or at least a big part of them. Sounds like a new hard drive or an SSD is on the way.

 

[Woody89]

You'll remember in my other thread that I have an SSD that is causing freezing. It would be nice to think that the freezing is being caused by this faulty hard drive, but the freeze persisted without this hard drive plugged in. I have spare hard drives, albeit of vastly inferior size, that I can use for awhile if the three errors on this disk make it unusable. With this hard drive however I have periods where it can run fine for weeks. With driver verifier on, I didn't have a BSOD all week until yesterday morning.

 

[essenbe]

I'm not sure. But a hard drive with errors can't help but cause some problems.

 

[Woody89]

When I've had the majority of crashes, they've been freezes (rather than BSOD with a subsequent dump) with the notorious multicoloured kaleidoscope effect. I know that this usually indicates a Hard Drive error, especially when there's no crash event or dump file created. With Sea Tools DOS, it's scanning the hard drive outside of the operating system which means the errors it found (three bad sectors) are hard errors that Windows won't be able to fix, correct? Windows has subsequently listed these three sectors as faulty in the event viewer though, so at least it won't try and access them. Coincidentally, I have recently exactly had three kaleidoscope freezes followed by Windows stating my hard drive has a bad sector. I guess Windows is doing its magic of avoiding bad sectors.

I've made a backup of all my important files and I will monitor the logs daily to see if any more bad sectors pop up. If I get some more in the near future then I will all but certainly replace the Hard Drive, as repeatedly failing sectors has a foregone conclusion that even a non-expert like me can come to.

Edit: And now that I think about it, on my old installation (prior to getting the SSD and installing Windows about 10 times :\) my event viewer always listed my Hard Drive as having some bad sectors but the quantity escapes me. I guess my previous installation found some too and it means I'm probably in for more freezes at some point.

Thanks again for all your help with these issues!

 

[essenbe]

The bad sectors usually grow and the controller does not know. When Seatools said it fixed it, it didn't. It can't. What it did was tell the controller not to write data there. If/when the bad sector gets larger, the controller won't know. As I understand it, Windows is just reporting to you. Windows tells the hard drive to write data. It's up to the hard drive controller where it is written to. At least that's the way I understand it.

 

[Woody89]

I thought I'd post an update on this. After having a freeze with the exact same symptoms as my 'SSD Freezes' (link to that thread) with this Hard Drive, perhaps the problem wasn't the SSD after all. A little consideration had me thinking that I was also using a different Operating System. With the same crash without the SSD, I decided to install my older operating system on Sunday (Windows 7 Ultimate.) I didn't use it this time as the last time I installed it, I had a lot of trouble with my activation code and decided to use Enterprise (downloaded from Microsoft's site), as I knew this key would work as it's one we recently procured for work but never used.

As it happens, my code went through fine this time. I've been running on Ultimate on my SSD since Sunday lunch time and I have had zero BSOD, zero freezes since. I'm not getting too hopeful until a bit more time has passed but it seems that the OS, for whatever reason, may have been the cause of those freezes. We did however identify I had memory issues, which was a good find. If it was the Operating System I can only imagine that somewhere something was incompatible with a piece of my Hardware.

My replacement memory arrived yesterday which is now in my PC and configured correctly in the BIOS. Up to 8 GB from 4 GB which, combined with an SSD, is like a brand new PC! As we also identified the Hard Drive I was using as another potential cause, it's currently on probation and I have a 1 TB HDD from another, unused PC (which passed a Sea Tools test with no errors) ready to chuck in in the event I have any more issues. Thanks for all of your help in this matter, as we successfully identified two problems.

I ran MemTest on the new memory, by the way, and it returned no errors. Happy days! I'm going to wait a little longer to mark this as solved, as I had a few days after one of my 'fixes' without a freeze or BSOD. Let's see how it goes.

 

[essenbe]

That sounds like you did great. I hope your good fortune continues. Good troubleshooting and great work. Keep us posted.