4GB Geil Vista BSOD - Ok I need some help!

The Old Man

The Old Man

The Old Man

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Joined
14 Apr 2004
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267
Location
UK
Hi,
I have been running my system fine with 2GB for some time at 3Ghz but I have had major problems since I added another 2GB of Geil Ultra Low Latency DDR800. I tested the RAM and it came back okay.

I tested the new 2GB RAM (2 sticks) and it booted fine into Vista and played games fine every time so no point in returning the RAM I thought. I read somewhere that you may have to drop your over clocking a bit with 4GB as it doesn't over clock as stably as 2GB. So I dropped my Core 2 Duo from 3Gz to 2.8Ghz and it seem to be fine and the blue screens of death went away for the last month or so.

Half Life 2 Episode 2 Orange Box arrived today, so before installing I downloaded the latest Nvidia drivers for Vista 64bit and un-installed the old ones, rebooted in safemode and used DriverSweeper to remove any remaining video files. Then I installed the latest Nvidia drivers for my 7900GTX (in safemode).

After rebooting, I find I can only boot back to safemode. Everytime I try to boot Vista Home Premium in Normal Mode I see the same blue screen of death that I had before when the CPU was at 3Ghz. So I figured after 10 attempts or so, that I would drop the overclocked CPU down from 2.8 to 2.4Ghz. I still get BSOD's after Vista loads before I see the login screen.

I have now defaulted back to 1.86Ghz in the BIOS after loading optimised setup defaults in the BIOS and making sure the RAM has 2.2v. I still get the same BSOD.

I am currently posing this via Safemode with networking enabled!
I know if I go back to 2GB I'll be fine again but WTF? How do I get it load into the desktop if its not the overclocked CPU or RAM that is the issue?

I have a dual boot system and booting into XP Pro is still working fine with the 4GB. Its driving me nuts!

I'd appreciate some help nailing this down as I'm stuck with XP or Vista with 2GB of RAM not 4GB.
 
Have you tested all 4Gb with memtest? (At once?)

You may have to add an extra+0.1v to your chipset.
what motherboard is it?
 
Have you tested all 4Gb with memtest? (At once?)
Click to expand...

Hi,
No I haven't, so I'm downloading Memtest now. I can boot into XP Pro just fine which is where I'm typing this reply from. Its always been fine, before I thought I'd fixed the issue with it booting into Vista by dropping the oveclock a little. Now I'm running at default, I can still get into XP but Vista gives me this BSOD everytime:
STOP: C0000218 {Registry File Failure}
The registry cannot load the hive file:
\SystemRoot\System32\Config\Security
or its log or alternate.
It is corrupt, absent or not writable.
Click to expand...

I don't understand why its started saying this again simply by removing the 7900GTX graphics driver and installing a new one.
I don't understand why dropping the overclock fixed it before, but now I'm running at default stock settings it hasn't fixed it for good.

You may have to add an extra+0.1v to your chipset.
what motherboard is it?
Click to expand...

I'm running the Gigabyte DS3 (BIOS F10) with the E6300 Core Duo 2 and 4GB of Geil DDR800. X-Fi Xtreme Gamer and 2 RAID 500GB HDD's on an Enermax Liberty 620w PSU.

Thanks for taking the time to reply.
 
The problem isn't yet resolved, I still can't boot into Vista.

After reading the 2 topics above, I went into the BIOS and set my RAM timings to 4-4-4-12 at 2.1v 800Mhz. This was then confirmed in Windows XP by CPU-Z and my CPU is still running at stock speed 1.86Ghz for now.

I tried booting into Vista and it failed to load.
I went into Vista Safe Mode and un-installed the Nvidia Driver and rebooted.
It booted fine into Vista! The next boot failed though.
So now I have uninstalled the Vista Nvidia Driver and attempted to reboot.
It won't boot into Vista normally and sometimes fails to load safemode.

Aaargghh! If I can get into Safemode again, I will uninstall the X-Fi Driver too in case thats the problem.
However this started with un-installing and updating the Nvidia driver.
 
Sounds like you've corrupted your Vista/graphics driver install by installing the drivers when the system was unstable.
 
Check if your BIOS has memory remapping enabled. Try the ram at 667. Install KB929777. Otherwise I cant think of anything else. I know an awful lot of people with this issue and the above has helped some of them. Does your board support up to 8gb or 4gb? I have seen this issue more with boards which are the latter. Check if there is an updated BIOS for the board.
 
Well I came to the same conclusion so I re-installed Vista and its working just fine now.
Took me longer to back up than the re-installation!

Thanks for your support! Posting my progress allowed me to consider what steps I was taking and keep track of things.
 
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