Problem with spelling on BSOD shown on colleague's laptop

MarcLister · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:35

A colleague of mine has been having problems connecting her laptop to the network at the school I work in. I managed to fix that but when I opened IE up to show her how to change the proxy settings for when she uses the laptop at home the machine seized up and then came a BSOD. After a while I realised that there was something very wrong with the BSOD, and by implication, possibly something seriously wrong with the laptop.

A picture of the BSOD is shown below but I'll paraphrase the problem. The text is awfully misspelled and I'm worried that it means there's a rather nasty virus or some such on the system. Normally I would google the 0x000000E8 stop code but the spelling problem suggests something is getting rather corrupted. In case the image isn't loading for people or they can't read the text I've written it up below the picture.

A probleen detected and windows has beenhas shut down to prevent damage to your .

IRQL_NOT_EQUAL

If this irst time you've seen this Stop is Stop error screen, restart puter. If this screen appears agpears again, follow these st

Check tore any new hardware or software oftware is properly installed. If this installation, ask your hardwarehardware or software manufacturer for any updates you might need.

If problinue, disable or remove any newlany newly installed hardware or softwable BIOS memory options such as such as caching or shadowing. If you nse Safe Moder to remove or disablr disable components, restart your comress F8 to select Advanced Started Startup Options, and then Select S.

Technicaation:

*** STOP000A (0x000000E8, 0x0000002, 0x00002, 0x0000001, 0x806E7A16)

Beginninf physical memory
Physicaldump complete
Contact tem administrator or technical shnical support group for further assitan

So, er, any ideas? Amusingly the laptop has Kaspersky running so if it indeed some nasty on there, I'll remember never to get Kaspersky.

MarcLister · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:54

I don't think the BSOD is bogus, I was wondering if something had corrupted it. Yep, it boots into Windows fine and no problems of any sorts with the graphics. It's such a weird problem, no obvious symptoms in Windows, and the most unusual BSOD I've ever seen.

I've told my colleague to back up her essential work files and get ready to wipe the disk but I wonder if that solution is good enough for the problem, whatever the cause is.

MarcLister · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:28

InertProtocol said:
Agreed, backup what you can and wipe it.

Yep, my thinking entirely.

CaptainCrash said:
I suppose if you think about it, if a computer is in distress (for whatever reason), there's no reason why a BSOD itself should be immune from the effects.

I reckon a format/reinstall should fix it anyway, providing it was working OK previously - I'd run the usual hardware diagnostics before reinstalling, but beyond that I don't see what else you can do.

Chkdsk and the like?

And I agree about a BSOD not being immune from a problem, whatever it is, it's just that I've NEVER seen a BSOD go wrong like this. Normally you can trust the BSOD to be OK and to give some useful information if you know what it's telling you.

MarcLister · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:29

Rozzy85 said:
Could be a low level virus but seems to inconsistent with the random characters. Corrupt main memory or even GPU memory can cause issues like this where characters sets become scrambled so you should run a memory test.

Like your thinking.

So MemTest86+ for a few hours?

MarcLister · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:42

Rozzy85 said:
Yeah, best way to check. Run it independently without the OS. Does the GPU use shared memory or is it dedicated? It it's shared you may want to allocate as much of it to main memory so memtest can check it. I don't know of any tools that can check GPU RAM though.

Erm, dunno.

She's not back in until Monday so I'll download MemTest86+ and burn it onto a disc for her to run at home. She'll be too busy using it during the day to have the memory test running.

I'm tempted to tell her to wipe the disk and reinstall Windows and see if that fixes it. If we get problems again, THEN take the time to run a memory test.

MarcLister · 7 Sep 2011 at 22:36

CaptainCrash said:
Personally I'd do the hardware checking first (run the HDD manufacturer's diagnostic as well as memtest86) - it's a bit of a pain and *probably* unnecessary, but you might as well do things methodically rather than maybe end up making yet more work for yourself down the road.

I suppose you're right.

CaptainCrash said:
If she's OK reinstalling Windows without your supervision (a female? are you sure?), I guess it's no skin off your nose.

Well she asked me to help her with backing up her files and her partner should be OK to re-install Windows.

Pho said:
As said before, I've mostly seen this with corrupt GPU memory / system memory - it's extremely unlikely it's a virus.

Can you extract a minidump from c:\windows\minidump from when it crashed?

Would a corrupt GPU/system memory not cause other visible symptoms in Windows? Apart from running a bit slow (I used msconfig to stop some unneeded rubbish running on startup) there were no signs of any serious problems.

When she's back in on Monday I'll see what's in the minidump folder. How big is that file likely to be? If I email her I might be able to get her to attach any files in that folder.