Constant BSOD's

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Thanks to anyone for giving this a go, It's becoming a real pain. It's also getting quite late so apologies if it's a little all over the place. Feel free to ask if you need any more information.

OK, so some basics to start:

My PC:

Asus PC5KC Mobo
4GB Corsair DDR 800mhz PC26400 XMS2 Memory
Antec 500w PSU
8800GTS 512mb
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Windows Vista 32bit Ultimate (SP1)


A few months ago I was experiencing a few blue screens every so often, I cant remember exactly what they were but I flashed my BIOS to the latest version and it fixed my issues. This was about 1 month ago, so I'm not sure if this is related but this is the ONLY CHANGE I have made for a while now. It's also worth nothing that the BSOD's were abit different than what I have now, and never prevented me from booting. I was also able to re-install vista without issue.


So, the problem:

I was last using my PC on Sunday night, was working fine watching a film on it (one that i've seen before, so I dont expect foul play from it) - shut it down as usual, no problem.

Thankfully I had Monday off work, so I was quite looking forward to getting on it and having a nice relaxing day infront of it. I turn it on as usual, and I received a series of blue screens, I didnt get the change to write these down but from memory they included an error about a ntfs.sys file, one about bootmgr and a kernal issue. Always mentioning that the file was either missing or corrupt. Tried rebooting several times but gave up.

Tried again a few hours later and WOW, it booted up fine? Got into windows and thought hmm, OK, nevermind. Played abit of Football Manager and opened up quite a few apps and Firefox windows, started to browse Youtube and it crashed on me. Not sure again on the BSOD, but I'm pretty sure it was the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL bsod. Tried again to turn my machine on but no luck. Went out, came back a few hours later and it worked AGAIN. This time, I had an alert about new hardware. It turns out the drivers for my GFX card were corrupt from looking in device manager so I re-downloaded the latest drivers, when I rebooted. Same problem again.

Once again, after an hour or two I was able to attempt to re-install Vista, found my CD and loaded it in.

So I try and re-install vista on my hardrive. Doesnt even get that far. Loads up the "Windows is loading files..."

Receive a windows boot manager error:

Windows Failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause (etc).

FILE: \windows\system32\config\system

STATUS: 0xc0000098

INFO: Windows failed to load because the system registry file is missing, or corrupt.



At this point I was wondering if my hardrive was the problem, so I managed to find my spare HD (very recent, unused) and plugged that in. Whenever I attempt to install windows on that:

Windows Failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might be the cause (etc)

FILE: \windows\system32\drivers\volmgrx.sys

Status: 0xc0000098


Eventually I managed to load up from my old hardrive, and my previously planned check disk started to run:

Got to stage 4 and crashed.....

BSOD Technical Information:

STOP: 0x00000008e (0xc0000005, 0x81c892cc, 0x8bef79a0, 0x00000000)

No more information on this one.


As a last resort, I've tried to reflash my BIOS, this went through fine. But upon booting to windows (from my old HD), I received another BSOD:

This time,

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

STOP: 0x0000000A (0xcc598147, 0x0000001B, 0x00000001, 0x81d05214)

Anyone have any ideas? I'd like to think of myself as pretty technical but BSOD's are not something that I have any experiance of! Many Thanks in advance for any ideas!

(Oh and 1 other thing, I have already switched my RAM as part of my original problem stated above - Can always try it again)
 
0xA errors are caused by either hardware or by drivers attempting to access an IRQ Level addresss that they have no business doing so.

0x8E errors are almost always caused by hardware and are especially indicative of corrupted memory.

Therefore my first best advice is for you to run Memtest on your RAM.

See link: https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic62524.html

Let it run for a LONG time. The rule is a minimum of 7 Passes. There are 8 individual tests per Pass. Many people will start this test before going to bed and check it the next day.

If you have errors you have corrupted memory and it needs to be replaced.

Also, with errors you need to run this test per stick of RAM. Take out one and run the test. Then take that one out and put the other in and run the test. If you start getting errors before 7 Passes you know that stick is corrupted and you don’t need to run the test any further on that stick.
 
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