Blue Screen Death VXD

[superbobu2]

I have fdisk twice now thinking it was a corrupted OS. Running W98 SE AMD 650mhz on Gigabyte board. I kept getting blue screens with a vxd msg and also system reboots all by itself or just goes black and freezes. Very frustrating. Happens at anytime. I had a viper 770 ultra card which i thought was the problem. went to a stealth III which worked for 2 days. Then I tried a ATI Rage fury 128 and it started with blue screens after 2 days and now I am on a brand new 3D prophet 4500 and this morning, the second day running it, I got a blue screen vxd error. Ran fine all day Jan 1 during my fdisk and entering all my programs. Not sure what to check next. Could it be power supply, mother board, agp slot, memory????? Very very frustrated! Any suggestions appreciated

Bob

 

[Phantasm66]

is your cpu fan turning well and keeping your chip new and cool? when this is not so, the machine can periodically blue screen and throw you off. this can commonly be seen where operations in ms-dos like your fdisking are successful and there and no problems, but when you fire up windows the machine blue screens after a time.

is there a pattern to the blue screens, or is the information you are giving completely random? I mean, is the blue screen a continual crash in the same program?

You might also want to run a surface scan of your HDD in dos as you may have a drive that's running into problems.

definately sounds hardware related at this stage. try running the machine without the cover on, looking for obvious problems. reseat RAM, etc. Finally reset processor if all else fails, but try reseating all PCI cards first too.

 

[Nodsu]

It would be nice to know what exactly is the BSOD telling you.

More details on hardware wouldn't hurt either..

If you have a mobo with VIA Apollo chipset, then disabling AGP 4x may help.

 

[Rick]

Are there certain times when you experience these BSODs? Perhaps while gaming? Or on OS bootup?

Assuming your system is not overclocked or tweaked in anyway, my bet is on the memory or drivers. Try swapping it out with memory you know works properly, or try each of your memory modules by theirselves. Also, you may want to switch DIMM slots etc...

Disabling "Quick boot" in your BIOS options (if available) will initiate a basic memory test on bootup. This doesn't always catch problems, but it is worth a shot. If it comes up with an error, then your memory is definitely bad. If it doesn't come up with an error, then don't assume it isn't bad... Because it still may be. If your memory were bad enough to be caught by this though, it probably wouldn't boot at all.

My recommendation is not to run chkdsk or scandisk on an important drive that "appears" to be damaged. Bad memory often reports that files are corrupt or missing, when actually they are fine. Running disk utilities can ruin a file system under these situations as I have recently learned about three times.

Proper cooling is a good idea as well. Check to make sure your CPU fan is running properly.

Try different drivers, particularly video card and IDE chipset drivers.

 

[StormBringer]

Ditto to what Rick said.
To add upon that, you might want to make sure you have removed your old drivers completely. Since you have changed video cards, several times, you may have old drivers still there which may be causing the problem, especially if something was wrong with them to begin with.

 

[Phantasm66]

Originally posted by StormBringer
Ditto to what Rick said.
To add upon that, you might want to make sure you have removed your old drivers completely. Since you have changed video cards, several times, you may have old drivers still there which may be causing the problem, especially if something was wrong with them to begin with.

Doesn't he say that he has fdisked the machine twice??

 

[StormBringer]

Yeah, I didn't see that, but if he kept installing the same set of drivers from the same disc, and something was wrong with them, or if his configuration just didn't agree with that version of them, this could still be the problem.

 

[Rick]

Originally posted by Phantasm66
Doesn't he say that he has fdisked the machine twice??

Chances are, he's installed the same drivers too. It might be worthwhile to try different drivers the next time this happens.

 

[superbobu2]

Hardware info

Ok here is what I got. AMD 650mhz with two IBM 7200 hd, one 20GB(Master) and one 40GB(Slave)
Right now I am running a 3d Prophet 4500 64mb vid card. Just reinstalled W98SE for second time in two weeks. 256mb of memory. I do not have the blue screen message yet. I have not gotten it again. Right now just getting system freezes and reboots. It happens randomly so I can't pinpoint if its a program doing it. Gonna try swapping memory. Did fdisk and a thorough scan disk and it went fine. No problems found.

Right now its a needle in a haystack. very frustrating.

Hopefully I will get the blue screen msg soon and I can research more then and post it for you guys.

Thanks for the suggestions