HP Z230 & Z240 hangs up

[vish1909]

Hi,
I am having system hang issue on HP Z230 & Z240 Workstations. Windows Application logs shows "The system has rebooted without cleanly shutting down first. This error could be caused if the system stopped responding, crashed, or lost power unexpectedly." with Event ID 41, Task Category 63, and all BugCheckCode = 0x0. I captured HW tool logs and it shows that CPU utilization is not high and temperature is also in specified range. I ran HP diagnostics extensive tests to check Hardware issues (
1. Windows extended RAM test, as installed to disk
2. MemTest86 on RAM, run from external CDROM
3. HP PC Hardware Diagnostics UEFI, as installed to disk
4. HP PC Hardware Diagnostics UEFI 6.3 from external USB drive ), all passed.

When System hang happens, it looks like hard hang - interfaces (Keyboard, mouse and display) are not responding. Only way to recover from this hang is to reboot the system from the power switch. I am trying to find out what can cause this kind of hang and how can I verify it as well ? So could you please help me to resolve this issue ? What tools can help me to identify the root cause ? or what experiment ?

I am using windows 7 on my all systems, all has McAfee Antivirus.

Please help!!

Thank you.

 

[bambiboom]

vish1909,

There is not much on which to base an opinion but the symptoms seem to me to be either driver conflict or possibly, running out of memory.

Some wild guesses:

1. Boot into Safe mode so as to load the minimal drivers and see if the systems freezes under similar loads, which signals possible driver conflic.,

2. Go through msconfig and carefully disable nonessential startup components- especially updating and scheduling background programs. Be very careful about disabling services.

3. Go through Task Manager / Performance / Processes and End Process on non-essential.

4. Check Task Manager Performance and see how much RAM is utilized. Rendering and I think animation and video editing can saturate the RAM and make the system run on the disk. I had a situation on an HP z420 that despite having 32GB of RAM and a 6-core @ 4.1GHz would freeze of become impossibly sluggish during CPU rendering. It turned out that the setup phase on large single image rendering needed 37+GB, even though the steady running state needed "only" 17GB. My new system (z620) has 64GB and an 8-core @ 4.3GHz - no more trouble.

BambiBoom

 

[vish1909]

vish1909,

There is not much on which to base an opinion but the symptoms seem to me to be either driver conflict or possibly, running out of memory.

Some wild guesses:

1. Boot into Safe mode so as to load the minimal drivers and see if the systems freezes under similar loads, which signals possible driver conflic.,

2. Go through msconfig and carefully disable nonessential startup components- especially updating and scheduling background programs. Be very careful about disabling services.

3. Go through Task Manager / Performance / Processes and End Process on non-essential.

4. Check Task Manager Performance and see how much RAM is utilized. Rendering and I think animation and video editing can saturate the RAM and make the system run on the disk. I had a situation on an HP z420 that despite having 32GB of RAM and a 6-core @ 4.1GHz would freeze of become impossibly sluggish during CPU rendering. It turned out that the setup phase on large single image rendering needed 37+GB, even though the steady running state needed "only" 17GB. My new system (z620) has 64GB and an 8-core @ 4.3GHz - no more trouble.

BambiBoom

Thank you BambiBoom for the reply. To me also looks like driver conflict. Do you know any way I can confirm/check for driver conflict ?
We checked memory memory utilization using HW tool and it looks normal .

 

[bambiboom]

vish1909,

It's difficult to know where to start without knowing quite a lot about the system- hardware, software, configuration. The fact that these events are occurring on two different models is an interesting aspect too, as it means that the cause is common to both.

1. One idea along those lines concerns updates and new software added. I had a significant, mysterious problem only from a Firefox update. Can you try rolling one of the systems back to a restore point dating previously to the problem?

2. What kind of malware / virus scans did you do?

3. Consider joining the HP Business and Workstation Support Forum:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/bd-p/Business-PC-Workstation-POS

As these are specialized systems, the chance of someone there knowing the answer is far greater.

BambiBoom

 

[vish1909]

vish1909,

It's difficult to know where to start without knowing quite a lot about the system- hardware, software, configuration. The fact that these events are occurring on two different models is an interesting aspect too, as it means that the cause is common to both.

1. One idea along those lines concerns updates and new software added. I had a significant, mysterious problem only from a Firefox update. Can you try rolling one of the systems back to a restore point dating previously to the problem?

2. What kind of malware / virus scans did you do?

3. Consider joining the HP Business and Workstation Support Forum:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Business-PCs-Workstations-and-Point-of-Sale-Systems/bd-p/Business-PC-Workstation-POS

As these are specialized systems, the chance of someone there knowing the answer is far greater.

BambiBoom

Thank you BambiBoom for all your suggestions. I will try to do system restore. I am using McAfee antivirus, and run standard virus scan.

I will post it on HP site - suggested by you. Hopefully someone aware of this issue.

Thank you very much.