Faulty finding advice needed, please

dcsarge

dcsarge

dcsarge

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I always manage to sort out computer faults for friends and family but my system is giving me a headache for the past week and I could do with third party input :).

The problems started with 0x00000124 errors after updating my Geforce drivers to the latest WHQL ones (320.18) in the hope of getting a minor boost in Far Cry 3 (actually made performance worse, very choppy frame rate). After testing without OCs and playing with voltage I rolled back to earlier drivers and all was good until a couple of days ago.

I am now getting constant random freezes in desktop, software errors (i/o errors to all sorts of addresses and Exception Breakpoint errors). Once the software errors start most running programs close (Skype, Sky Drive etc) and I will be unable to view anything on Start Menu/All Programs or open explorer to look at my hard drive.

The system will usually shutdown after this or fail to open anything until restart it. When it does shutdown it will fail to power off completely, as the fans and power light stay on.

I have run CHKDSK and it recover about 20Gb miss-allocated clusters and the HDD fails all Seagate Tools tests but SMART status is ok and HD Tune only shows one bad cluster. I spent most of yesterday checking the memory and no faults were found on any stick or socket.

The only other things I can think of are either motherboard or PSU faults, both of which will be very hard to diagnose without replacements to swap out for testing.

Am I missing anything obvious?

Q6600, Asus P5Q SE2 P45 mobo, 4x2Gb XMS2 DDR2, Samsung HD322HJ 320Gb hdd, 560ti 1Gb and Antec New Truepower 650W modular PSU.
 
Thanks for the replies guys.

Bluntwrapped said:
Are you getting "the graphics driver has stopped working and recovered"?
Click to expand...

Nope, haven't had this error for a long time and that was on nvidia beta drivers. I haven't had any problems that I can directly attribute to the gpu side of the system since I re-installed older drivers.

Puppetmaster said:
Is your CPU overclocked?
Click to expand...

I have tried running the system without any overclocked setting and it didn't help. It is really odd how random the problem is. I have been popping in and out on errands all day and the system has been fine since I started this thread but this morning it just kept throwing up errors and having to restart.

I will give that program a try and see what it says :).
 
Well the HDSentinel gives it 91% 'Excellent' Health rating but with the following report.

"The drive found 1 bad sectors during its self test.
There are 8 weak sectors found on the disk surface. They may be remapped any time in the later use of the disk.
395 errors occured during data transfer. This may indicate problem of the device or with data/power cables. It is recommended to examine and replace the cables if possible.
At this point, warranty replacement of the disk is not yet possible, only if the health drops further.
It is recommended to examine the log of the disk regularly. All new problems found will be logged there.
No actions needed."

I hadn't got around to trying different cables yet so that will be my next step but looks like I can't rule out the drive, motherboard controller or power issues yet.
 
check the power cables into your graphics card are tight or not fauity, I have had similar problems with pc shutting down/ rebooting, bsods witrh a loose connector
 
This has all the hallmarks of bad ram..odd since you've tested it. I can only draw the same conclusion as yourself, bad motherboard or power supply.
 
Yeah, I expected the RAM to show something when I first started getting errors but there might be a particular set of circumstances that trigger the error that I haven't spotted yet.

It is odd that when it is stable I can play 3 hours on Far Cry 3 without issue but when doing very little (web browsing or checking spreadsheets) it can throw a complete wobbler (technical term :D).

I will try swapping cables and reseating bits when I have a bit more time to fiddle without interruption but other than that I will have to wait until I can afford to replace/upgrade various parts.

Could these problems be caused if the PSU wasn't providing stable power at low load, yet not struggle when running at gaming load?
 
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Have you had a look in event manager to see if there are any clues there? Might be worth a look. May be worth running system file checker to check no corrupted windows system files as there are indications of corruption on the hard drive. Just a few thoughts other than what has already been suggested.

How old is the psu? Ihe psu voltage could be unstable - can you swap it out with known good just to eliminate the psu as a possible cause?
 
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Sounds like a problem with writing to the hard disk, particularly cached files when browsing etc.

It might be worth disconnecting the hard disk, burning a livecd and attempting to test for stability with that.
 
Inferno99 said:
Sounds like a problem with writing to the hard disk, particularly cached files when browsing etc.

It might be worth disconnecting the hard disk, burning a livecd and attempting to test for stability with that.
Click to expand...

Good idea. Would also suggest running bare minimum spec to test as well.

Mark
 
Thanks for the ideas. I will try them over the next few days. Just been on a 360 mile round trip to pick my daughter up from adventure camp and all I want is a decent cup of tea :).
 
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