An Elusive BSOD

relic

relic

relic

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Joined
7 Sep 2007
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3
Hi all,

After a fair bit of lurking around the forums i figured id see if you guys could help solve an irritating problem ive been having.

I recently put together a little system based around the ASUS Vintage V3-M2V890 Barebone.

The specs are:

ASUS Vintage V3-M2V890
Antec SmartPower II 500W Modular PSU
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Kingston 1GB DDR2 667MHz
Western Digital WD2500KS 250GB
XFX 8400GS 256MB DDR2

So anyway, it all went together fine. Windows XP SP2 installed with no problems and everything was working fine. About 4 days into its life i got the first BSOD. The full stop code is as follows..

0x0000009c (0x00000004, 0x8054d5f0, 0xb2000010, 0x00010c0f)

Ive looked around the web a fair bit and the info i found was that its hardware related, most commonly faulty ram or an overheating issue. The first thing i did was check my temps, all was fine there but just to sure i added 2x akasa 80mm ambers(one at the front and back). This dropped the temps by a large amount but a couple of days later i found out it didnt solve the problem as the same BSOD appeared again.

Next step was memtest, 12 hours and no errors was enough proof for me. Right after that i ran orthos in an attempt to just recreate the error more than anything but 12 hours of that went by and no BSOD.

After that i went looking for a way to stress the graphics card and came across atitool which although my card isnt an ati card it made my card pretty hot. Hotter than it is while playing any game that i play so i figured that was a decent enough test. I wasnt able to reproduce the error that way either.

The strangest thing about this error is how random it is, i can be playing a game for 5mins and it could happen but i could go days and days without it. I have gone week without seeing the error. The error has also never occured during the usual browsing, word processor activitys. It has only occured while gaming but it isnt limited to one game either, ive had it happen in two seperate games.

Another thing that may or may not help diagnose this is that although ive set the computer to not automatically restart in the event of a BSOD, the computer always does.


So there you go, any advice would be welcome.

thanks.
 
Have you got automatic restarts turned on? If you have and it's automatically rebooting chances are you're missing the information that it's going to give on the blue screen. I'd suggest turning it off if you do have it on. Then I would download the Debugging Tools for Windows. When you download and install that you can follow the next steps:

1. Open the program and click File menu, then "Symbols path"
2. Type in "SRV*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols" without the quotes
3. Then click File -> Open Crash Dump and browse to C:\Windows\Minidump and open the latest crash dump
4. When you open it, it'll take a while to load in but when it does you'll be connected to the debugger
5. When you are connected type in "!anaylze -v" without the quotes to get info on why the computer rebooted.

It might take a while to reach step 5, sometimes it takes around 30 seconds so be patient. What this will do is give you a full page of information regarding the error that you have had. You should if possible do that and paste the contents here so we can take a look at it, namely the filename that caused the problem and the actual BSOD message (such as IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL - it's generally near the top of the report).

If you've done all that testing however, it may just come down to a driver problem. When I've searched bugcheck information on the internet, it's suprising how many people say that a bugcheck / BSOD automatically means you have a hardware failure :P May well be in this case that it is, but can't overlook driver problem.
 
hi flibby, ty for the reply.

I set the computer to not automatically right after my first encounter with the bsod but for some reason it doesnt obey. It always restarts.

Ive done what you said and although this is kinda out of my league now ill attempt to paste the important bits of the result..

-----

BugCheck 9C, {4, 8054d5f0, b2000010, 10c0f}

Probably caused by : Unknown_Image ( ANALYSIS_INCONCLUSIVE )

MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION (9c)
A fatal Machine Check Exception has occurred.

BUGCHECK_STR: 0x9C_AuthenticAMD

CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT: 2

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: DRIVER_FAULT

PROCESS_NAME: Idle

LAST_CONTROL_TRANSFER: from 806e7bff to 804f9deb

STACK_COMMAND: kb

SYMBOL_NAME: ANALYSIS_INCONCLUSIVE

MODULE_NAME: Unknown_Module

IMAGE_NAME: Unknown_Image

DEBUG_FLR_IMAGE_TIMESTAMP: 0

FAILURE_BUCKET_ID: 0x9C_AuthenticAMD_ANALYSIS_INCONCLUSIVE

BUCKET_ID: 0x9C_AuthenticAMD_ANALYSIS_INCONCLUSIVE

-----
 
DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: DRIVER_FAULT
Click to expand...
Thought as much :) Most likely related to a driver. The problem however is that the minidump doesn't include the module name which is going to be the filename, which is harsh as we wouldn't know where to start.

Is a format and full reinstall out of the question? If you can do that, then when you do format make 100% sure that you do a full write-to-zero format (long format, not short) as if you do a short format it doesn't erase all the data and it can cause havoc with a new Windows install.
 
When i saw the "DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: DRIVER_FAULT" text, i knew what was coming. Thanks for the help flibby. I'll format sometime today and see what happens from there.

thanks again.
 
try updating everything to the latest drivers from the internet, sometimes the ones from motherboard/other hardware cd's are buggy because its usually an old version.
 
im glad its not just me that has this problem,
i have 2 x ASUS Vintage V3 and they have been nothing but problems, crashing . blue screens i got that fed up i orderd 2 x new boards and new cases and rebuilt them and they have been fine since.:rolleyes:
 
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