BSOD Help: No memory dump and system restore didn't help

[dannyboy325]

Hi Everyone,

I built a desktop a couple of years back (ASUS Motherboard, i7-2600k, M4 SSDm Secondary HDD, GTX 560 Ti) but have only been using it on and off as I was studying overseas. I've been using it this round since August, but have recently suddenly started getting BSODs everytime I used it.

The system boots as per normal but after a couple of minutes of use (it can vary from 10 minutes to an hour) it hangs and then crashes with a BSOD. I've enabled small memory dump in the hopes that it'll give me a better idea of what went wrong, but that only worked the first time: subsequently the computer just gets stuck on "Initializing disk for crash dump" even if left overnight.

I tried executing a system restore to a point earlier in December but that doesn't seem to have solved the problem.

Previously the BSOD listed different possible causes: once it was ataport.sys, then volmgrx.sys, then netbios.sys, amongst others. The most recent BSODs have not identifies a specific driver/process. The last one just indicates: "STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x0000000000000003, 0xFFFFFA80086E2B10, 0xFFFFFA80086E2DF0, 0xFFFFF8000FBD56D0)"

Any help would be greatly appreciated: or would my only option be a clean install (Would that actually help? Wouldn't want to do that unnecessarily)

Thanks in advance!

 

[Shaun o]

The three key culprits and the causes of Blue screen of death messages are.

1. A power supply unit beginning to fail, the voltage on output regulating to much causing an unstable system.
Borrow another Power supply if you can and test the system for stability with it.

2. Bad or faulty Memory, so test each stick of memory on it`s own connected to the system and run a memory test on each memory stick to check for errors.

3. A hard drive or SSD drive beginning to fail.
With a mechanical drive it will be the magnetic disk platter or read write heads of the physical drive.

With a SSD based drive worn out flash memory, due to being written to a part of the flash memory bank where it can no longer store or hold data to it when programmed.

4. Swap out all of your old Sata data cables in the system out, as it could be as simple as a faulty cable.
Particularly the one used with the system drive with the windows Os installed on it.


5. Check that the power via the Psu to the Sata drives are firmly connected to the drives them self and not loose in anyway.

 

[dannyboy325]

Thanks for the reply!

1. I'm not able to get my hands on another PSU

2. Ran memtest86 and got no errors on my memory

3. Ran chkdsk and found no errors on the drives

Will try removing and plugging in the cables in my set up again.

On the last BSOD the computer managed to create a minidump that indicated hal.dll+12a3b as the culprit: does this mean anything specific?

Thanks for your help!