BSOD or Go-Black, 1000007f, Won't Reboot For A While

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I went on a business trip out to California, and while out there my desktop started having problems. I do not know if it is something the kids installed or if it is hardware related.

At first I thought it was something installed, because that is usually what the problem turns out to be. But the particulars of the symptoms seem more hardware related, but so far everything I know how to check has turned out ok there as well.

Windows XP SP2.

The error message we find in the System event viewer is Event 1003 (not paired with a 1001):

Error code 1000007f, parameter1 00000008, parameter2 80042000, parameter3 00000000, parameter4 00000000.

The symptoms are that the machine will either flash a BSOD or will simply go black and try to reboot. 90% of the time when this happens, the machine will not even make it to the BIOS check-- it will just sit there, screen black, with the drive crunching-- for about an hour. If I unplug it, after about an hour it will boot or if I don't unplug it, it will eventually boot (generally after about an hour of spinning its wheels).

I have attached a zip file with minidumps.

Can someone with more skill in this area help me try to figure out what the problem is so I know what to fix? Thanks!
 
Other things I have tried so far:

Complete virus scan. No problems.
Complete Spyware scans (Spybot and Adaware)
Memory check. No problems on five scans. When I left it just repeating overnight, it rebooted (I am guessing for the same reason).
 
Inside the 4 MiniDumps:

1. Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys
2. Probably caused by : ntoskrnl.exe
3. Probably caused by : memory_corruption
4. BugCheck 1000000A, {be55e0b0, 2, 0, 804f9d73}
Probably caused by : memory_corruption

Please run 7 Passes of Memtest
One user stated he lowered the speed of his Ram and all came good
You might want to check in Bios, for any overclocking
(to get into BIOS, press the key (DEL or F2 or other) that shows, when your system starts up)
 
Kimsland,

When I read your reply, I had no doubt that what you were seeing in the minidumps was what is in there, but had little confidence in the Memtest suggestion as I had both walked my wife through doing Memtest while I was out of town and had repeated it myself after returning. Neither time did Memtest find any problems, no matter how many passes I used (although occasionally it would simply reboot after God only knows how long; but most of the time, nothing abnormal at all).

But given that you took the time to reply, I took the time to follow your suggestion. And lo and behold, paydirt. On test 4 on the first pass, well over 1 million errors before I decided to abort.

I had some extra memory cards laying around, swapped one out, and now Memtest is running without issues. I have a long time until it completes seven passes, but I am well beyond where it was finding the errors earlier this morning. I am very optimistic that this was the cause of the problems. Thank you very much!

I would love to learn a bit more about how you analyzed the minidumps-- did you just use dumpchk.exe? If so, what parameters did you use to get the information you posted?

Also, I am curious as to what would have caused the memory problem to be so intermittent, to the point where it was not being caught by Memtest as little as a month ago (while the random crashes were occurring during that month). Is it normal for memory to fail in this way? I would have imagined that when memory went bad, it would do so in a way that would make it immediately detectable by memory testing. Apparently not?

Anyhow, thanks again for the help. It was... helpful!
 
Lets just say Memtest is not always 100% on the 100% ok results (ie 7 passes)
Whereas when Memtest receives an error, that's pretty conclusive.

Here's some info on Windebug:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/installx86.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/install64bit.mspx

I found an excellent setup tutorial, from one of those geek pages, but I can't find it (this is why I haven't posted back straight away) I'll post if I do find it.

Anyway good news on the find, and thanks for doing the steps, even though I had earlier read your post too. :)
 
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