BSOD's - help required

saguy

saguy

saguy

Associate
Joined
8 Jul 2005
Posts
1,407
I have had 6 BSOD's in 5 days since cleaning out the dust from my PC. It has to be hardware related as it started immediately after the clean out. The crashes are completely random, sometimes while gaming sometimes opening a file or a folder. I am not sure which hardware component is the culprit.

I have used a dump file viewer and there are 3 drivers linked to the crashes.

ntoskrnl.exe
cmudaxp.sys (Xonar sound card which I have now removed)
hal.dll (3 of the BSOD's)

Any suggestions would be welcome.

Here is the link to my dump files: https://www.dropbox.com/s/3c46b2uj8r5mvk4/Minidump.rar
 
Last edited:
open the case, reseat the RAM and try again.

In my experience, hardware bsod's are ram related most of the time.

how did you clear the dust out? compressed air? brush? vacuum?
 
AHarvey said:
open the case, reseat the RAM and try again.

In my experience, hardware bsod's are ram related most of the time.

how did you clear the dust out? compressed air? brush? vacuum?
Click to expand...
I used a vacuum cleaner that was set to blow. I have reseated the ram and run memtest overnight without any errors. I am using the Seagate utility to check the hard drives - so far no errors. I have removed my soundcard so it has to be the graphics card or motherboard. I am leaning towards motherboard as there are no graphic related driver crashes in the crash dump file.
 
Most likely you've fried the RAM with the static from the vacuum cleaner - it's never recommended to vacuum electrical goods, and computer innards are especially susceptible.

Do a memtest and if errors appear, you know where the problem is. If you do get errors, try each stick individually and try again.

[edt: really shouldn't skim-read forums in a hurry!]

Looking at the debug files it just says likely caused by "hardware". In all the instances I've seen, a faulty graphics crash normally gives you a driver as a possible reason, even when it's a hardware issue, but there's no indications of that here. That would lead me to the motherboard too.

Edit2: There was one crash caused by "cmudaxp.sys", which is a Xonar driver, but unless your motherboard uses a CMedia chip (unlikely, especially so of your sig is up to date, given the ASUS site says the P5Q uses a Realtek chip), then removing the sound card would have stopped that. So yeah, I'm saying motherboard.
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the help guys. I reseated all the SATA cables and have not had any crashes for the past 2 days so I am praying that this was the issue.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom