Hardware Blue Screen of Death problems

Foxi4

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Most RAM sticks have a life-time warranty, you're entitled to return the faulty stick to the store you bought it from or send it directly to the manufacturer to receive a replacement.

Before you replace them though, you may try to perform the same test without the GFX card inserted, using the built-in chip instead, provided that you have one, to assert whether the result is indeed true.

It is also recommended to return the BIOS of your system to its Factory Default settings before you proceed with further scans - perhaps the RAM's settings are incorrect and thus leading to false positives. Remember to backup your BIOS settings beforehand to ensure that you will be capable of returning to system stability afterwards - Windows can be very picky about the BIOS settings sometimes. Ensure that the RAM sticks are getting as much voltage as they require and are working at a frequency specified by the manufacturer - auto-detect doesn't always work and may lead to False Positives.

As for your hard drive, I sincerely recommend a deep scan (chkdsk) to attempt fixing its errors. In the worst-case scenario, you may attempt to zero-fill it, however that means that you will lose all the data, so create a backup copy of your files beforehand. It is recommended to use factory tools provided by the manufacturer of your drive - in your case, it's Western Digital tools which are freely downloadable on their website. If those tools fail to recover your hard drive to a healthy state, there are also some third-party tools that claim to do the job. A good example would be HDD Regenerator, which attempts to re-magnetize bad sectors or replace them using the pool of healthy sectors the drive has for such an occasion, however the success rate of these kinds of tools is rather debatable.

In other words, as originally assumed, your memory is failing you and your HDD appears to be having issues. It may be possible to recover from this, but I sincerely doubt it. The HDD will be fully functional, however its state will gradually decline until it fails, so consider a replacement in the nearby future if the errors will remain unfixed. The RAM sticks should be replacable without any problems if they are indeed faulty, so that won't cost you more than postage, unless the sticks you are using do not have a life-time warranty - simply contact the manufacturer's support line for more details.

To check which stick is faulty, use the method of elimination - run the test on each stick separately. If the sticks were sold as a kit, it's likely that the manufacturer will require you to send both, regardless of whether they are healthy or not and will replace them to ensure compatibility.

EDIT: Additionally, BCCode a signifies a driver error - as Rydian said, this points at OS corruption, which is undoubtly caused by your HDD's CRC error count. You require an OS reinstallation after all this is over for full stability. To make sure though, Hiren has a built-in driver checker - it should verify if all of your devices use correct and functioning drivers.
 

MindC0ntroll

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Ugh...yeah I bought my rig on eBay (It didn't come with everything and I've pretty much replaced everything besides the case and CPU) so there's no way to turn in the faulty RAM sticks. But I'll buy some new ones. And the guy I bought it from did tell me that the hard drive was somewhat failing. Which is why I bought the rig for such a cheap price. The CPU and case together are $200 and I got it for around $150. I was already looking at buying a 1 TB hard drive anyway, for more space.

What if I copy the current hard drive I have to a new one and install some new RAM sticks? Will that help or will I have to do anything else? I REALLY don't want to reinstall the OS, it's a pain to reinstall all my old programs...


Oh and also, when I bought my PC rig on eBay, it came with 12 GB of RAM, 2 sticks of 4 GB and 2 sticks of 2 GB. If both of the 4 GB sticks of RAM turn out to be faulty, does that mean that the other spare of 2 sticks will also be faulty? Of course, this is assuming that both of the RAM sticks I have installed right now are faulty.
 

Foxi4

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@MindC0ntrol - it doesn't matter, you could've bought them from Santa Claus and you're still entitled to replace them - contact the manufacturer of the sticks. What's the brand?

Faulty sticks *new* are quite a rarity. Faulty sticks after a session of overclocking-gone-wrong, which is EBay material, are not. Test individual sticks to assert the situation.

As for the OS, you *have* to reinstall if you want to avoid errors in the future and wish to keep system stability. There are certain programs that will automate installation of your programs out there... But, to be honest, just spend this one day in the weekend to properly configure your PC and install everything the way you should - it doesn't bite and PC's like when their users care.

I don't think you've performed the additional testing, or you didn't report on it. These can still be false positives or something entirely fixable.
 

MindC0ntroll

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Is there a method in which I can move my programs and files to a new hard drive from the corrupted hard drive that I have? Or will I have to format the old hard drive and reinstall all my programs on the new one?

I will test the other RAM sticks and hard drive in the weekend since I have a lot of work to do...
 

VampireLordAlucard

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I'm not nearly as experienced as these guys, but also check for this:

1. Google image search bulging capacitors.
2. Next time you open your computer, just glance over your capacitors to make sure the tops are flat.

I've seen a few computers that would blue-screen, and shut down on their own. Turned out they had some bad capacitors!
 

1stClassZackFair

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A couple of days ago my computer would freeze on start up so i removed one of my 512 ram sticks and it works great now. The problem is that i got the blue screen of death so i ran a virus scan using AVG Anti Virus and it looks like my pc doesn't have any viruses so that's not the cause of the blue screen. I'm thinking another one of my ram sticks is failing or maybe it's one of my hard drives. These are my pc's specs http://h10010.www1.h...4610.html?dnr=1
I currently have 2.5 gigs of ram due to the removal of one of the sticks that failed. Should I run the same tests that mindcontroll ran?
 

Ericthegreat

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For now you could just run your pc on just 1 of thoses 4gb ram sticks :P I wouldnt worry about capcitors if mem test brought up issues, just run it again with just 1 of each of thoses sticks in. Prob its just one.

@1stclasszackfair run memtest overnight and if it brings up errors its the ram.
 

1stClassZackFair

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Thanks Rydian ,it seems that I had some corrupted windows files and the scanner repaired them. Here is the detailed log file of the scan:

http://www.mediafire.com/?87kr8bv2923zq18
 

Rydian

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Damn, none of these want to be third-party driver issues...

092212-29780-01.dmp
9/22/2012 3:09:36 AM
IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
0x0000000a (00000000`00000000, 00000000`00000002, 00000000`00000000, fffff800`030a3442)
ntoskrnl.exe+7f1c0

No other components involved in the crash, which points to OS or hardware malfunctions. Try "sfc /scannow" in the commandline first.
 

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