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My rig bluescreened and restarted itself, but I can't find a relevant entry for the crash anywhere in the Event Viewer. Is there any other way to find out what happened? I'm on XP32 SP2.
Help with BSOD
- Thread starter manveruppd
- Start date
You can stop your PC from restarting when a bluescreen hits I think by right clicking My Computer, Advanced, Startup and Recovery.
Then try to replicate the bluescreen, you should get a code on the bluescreen itself which helps.
Other than that I'm not sure on the event log.
Then try to replicate the bluescreen, you should get a code on the bluescreen itself which helps.
Other than that I'm not sure on the event log.
That's the problem, this was completely random, the system was just idling, and it's the first time it's crashed in months of stability, so I can't replicate it! The strangest thing is that, following the crash, the computer wouldn't boot at all until I pulled back my overclock, even though, again, it's been stable in much more CPU-intensive applications with decent temps for months now!
Since last night I had one more freeze this morning, but I'm not sure if it's the same source because this one did log in event viewer: "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:" Running chkdsk found some errors, but those might have been caused by last night's crash (if the system was writing to disk when it happened), so I can't be sure if my disk is the cause of it or not...
I had some stability probems a few months before, I was sure it was my HDD packing it in, and it turned out to be the SATA modular power cable. Soon as I used another one all my problems disappeared. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be the same thing, as I just ran chkdsk again and it found some errors yet again, and two in the same day mean either the drive's packing it in or I'm having power problems again...
Since last night I had one more freeze this morning, but I'm not sure if it's the same source because this one did log in event viewer: "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. Please run the chkdsk utility on the volume C:" Running chkdsk found some errors, but those might have been caused by last night's crash (if the system was writing to disk when it happened), so I can't be sure if my disk is the cause of it or not...
I had some stability probems a few months before, I was sure it was my HDD packing it in, and it turned out to be the SATA modular power cable. Soon as I used another one all my problems disappeared. I have a sneaking suspicion that this might be the same thing, as I just ran chkdsk again and it found some errors yet again, and two in the same day mean either the drive's packing it in or I'm having power problems again...
Rather bizarrely I've had a similar issue, random crashes while doing things like web browsing with complete stability through hours of gaming etc.
I've backed off my overclock also and things have completely stabilised. I'm not the most patient of overclockers you see and a hint of instability isn't an issue for me as long as it's 99% stable.
That said, my crashes were becoming more and more frequent, have you run a memory test at all? if not I would recommend it, in the past when I've had bad RAM it's caused issues at odd times when the computer is hardly breaking a sweat. This may also go some way towards explaining corrupt data on your hard drive. Incidentally, I never truly got to the bottom of my problem but setting everything back to stock made it go away.
I'd set your system to not restart automatically anyway so you can catch it if it happens again.
I've backed off my overclock also and things have completely stabilised. I'm not the most patient of overclockers you see and a hint of instability isn't an issue for me as long as it's 99% stable.
That said, my crashes were becoming more and more frequent, have you run a memory test at all? if not I would recommend it, in the past when I've had bad RAM it's caused issues at odd times when the computer is hardly breaking a sweat. This may also go some way towards explaining corrupt data on your hard drive. Incidentally, I never truly got to the bottom of my problem but setting everything back to stock made it go away.
I'd set your system to not restart automatically anyway so you can catch it if it happens again.
Yep, I've already switched off the automatic restart, but haven't had any crashes since. I will try out memtest as well - my mind went to the hard drive/power cable as that was the issue last time (this was after days of testing and about 3 threads on here), but it could well be corrupt RAM I suppose. Thing is, backing off the overclock might not really have solved the problem, merely alleviated it by reducing the overall system power drain, which, if it's an issue of insufficient power to the hard drives again, might be helping my PSU cope. (This might be the casuse of your problem too btw.) If it turns out to be another cable or the PSU itself I'm going to drop-kick this Antec out the window and get an OCZ.
Ran chkdsk on all partitions several times. Latest was with /r option. Every time I run it I get errors of the following variety:
Nothing to worry about in itself, but EVERY TIME probably means either hte drive's dying or the power cable (again).
miniupdate: just spent half an hour running 3 instances of memtest within windows for 160% coverage with no errors. I'll test again with memtest86 tonight, but for a quick and dirty test it's fairly safe it's the drive(s) rather than the RAM.