Various BSoDs, don't know what they are referring to

Hello,

As the title suggests, I have gotten a variety of blue screens in the last few weeks and I'm assuming that it's related to a piece of hardware in my PC. I have gotten various blue screens which denoted the following:

Stop at 0x08E (C00000005, 805BF384, B279CB1C, 00000000),

PFN_LIST_CORRUPT
Stop at 0x04E (000000099, 00000010, 000000001, 00000000),

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA
Stop at 0x50 (B1074723, 00000008, B1074723, 00000000)


And others which have claimed a variety of files from CLASSPNP.sys, ACPI.sys, srv.sys, my audio card and also video card drivers.

I should also mention that I have run chkdsk /f /r, and have not had a chance to test anything after running those, but it completed without any issues.

I generally am pretty knowledgeable when it comes to this sort of thing and can usually figure out what is going wrong where, and what I can do to fix it. With the video and audio drivers, I have downloaded the new ones, uninstalled the old ones with Add/Remove programs and have installed the new ones. I still have seen them referenced in the errors at times. I play various games on the system (one of the most notable is WoW), and have been receiving a general error from the game at times quoting "memory referenced at x could not be (written/read) at y" and their suggestions seems to be that it could be the result of bad memory. I tried testing that out, but it didn't cite any errors and caused blue screens on multiple attempts.

I have also received several blue screens from doing things such as virus/malware scans (though I received some help with this earlier on these and everything seemed to come back clean), playing WoW and randomly blue screening instead of getting an error from the game itself, and I have also had issues booting Windows back up at times following these blue screens, with some of the errors as seen above. This is leading me to believe that it could possibly be the RAM, or the HDD since it seems to be having errors with some of the .sys files on startup on occasion, or even perhaps the motherboard itself is failing and causing the other hardware to have these issues in the first place.

At this point, I am sort of clueless as to where to begin, but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I won't get a chance to test whether it is the HDD or the motherboard until I go home from school which will be at the end of the week, but I would like to at least be able to use this PC for schoolwork, etc.

Thanks in advance!

Edited by Deviant281, 09 February 2010 - 04:32 AM.

random blue screens with different messages can be generated by bad memory (I hate it when stuff only goes a little bit bad) and overheated processor or even a bad board. (liquid damage on a laptop). Some times it is an aftereffect of an overheat condition of a processor even after the temp problem has been corrected.

I would remove one ram stick at a time and try each one in a different slot.

Model and serial/part number or description of MB and core parts might yield different approaches.

If you start to get a steady bsod/stop message then you can research that.

One of the things I did try, while I was trying to narrow down whether it was the sticks or not, was trying one at a time, switching slots, etc. Each one will boot up Windows individually, and I believe each one also gave me crash errors while playing WoW, too. I can't remember whether I tried to play or not with just one stick at a time so I will have to look into that. Even in different slots they seem to be having the issue and I could see that as potentially being the culprit here. Is it possible that it's just the motherboard RAM slots failing? I imagine one way to figure this out is to try the sticks in another PC, but again I won't be able to do that until I go home.

I had a problem with a different PC a few years earlier with an overheating processor and I seem to recall it stuttering on occasion, progressively getting worse the longer I played almost any game. That doesn't seem to be the case here, no stuttering and there is a lot of ventilation with a total of 1 front and 1 back fan, 2 side fans and a beast of a fan on the processor itself, so I'm guessing this is less likely to be the case.

Also, I guess it is important to note that the PC in question is a desktop and not a laptop. It's an MSI MS-7390 board, I will check the RAM sticks later when I have more time and I'm using a Seagate 500gb HDD. I don't know whether this will be helpful or not.

Edited by Deviant281, 09 February 2010 - 12:29 PM.

Well, just an update. I decided to run a memory diagnostics tool, HCI Memtest, which is able to test while booted up in Windows, rather than running upon bootup. I have 2 sticks of RAM, both 2gb each and both identical, they came in the same package.

I tested each of the two sticks separately and they produced some interesting results.

Stick 1 (started with the slot closest to edge and moved in, so Slot 1, 2, 3, 4 and 1 in that order):

MoBo Slot 1 (2 tests): 3 passes without errors on first test (it ran for about an hour), second test resulted in an error followed by a blue screen.
MoBo Slot 2 (1 test): Error
MoBo Slot 3 (1 test): Blue screen
MoBo Slot 4 (1 test): Error followed by a blue screen.


Stick 2 (started with the slot furthest from edge and moved out, so Slot 4, 3, 2, 1 in that order):

MoBo Slot 4 (1 test): Error
MoBo Slot 3 (1 test): Error
MoBo Slot 2 (1 test): blue screen
MoBo Slot 1 (1 test): Error followed by a blue screen.

During testing, the most common BSoD error was PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA, with the Stop at 0x50. On two occasions, system files were mentioned as possible causes. Generally when an error was reported and the blue screen occurred, the testing had not even been going for more than about 10-15 minutes.

According to the manual for the program, it claims that if I tested the sticks separately, in different slots, and they received error messages that it is possible that it is a motherboard failure and that my RAM sticks are fine. Is there anyone who thinks that this seems like a feasible conclusion? It's more or less what my original suspicion had been at the start of all of these problems, but none of them really seemed to exist before I had zeroed my HDD, and afterward is when some of these problems started happening. Does anyone have any suggestions based on this?

any memory test run while in windows is NOT going to be able to test the hardware without being subject to windows memory management and possible malware or even benign memory manipulation by commercial antivirus programs.

Run one with a linux based boot disk before you buy or trash any hardware based on the outcome.

Well, the problem is that I don't have access to blank discs and cannot burn an image from an .iso to one currently. The computer is clean of malware entirely, based on what was determined earlier with this system. When I get back home I will have access to discs and will likely run another one just to be sure, but this one claims to be as good if not better than most others and also mentions that yes, it is in fact limited to Windows memory management as you say.

I will provide more after the weekend.