I recently did a rather massive upgrade on my system and for the most part everything is working smoothly except for one Blue Screen Of Death that keeps popping up whenever I install something large from a CD or DVD. What happens is I'll put in a CD for a game for the computer to install. I go through the typical pre-installation stuff (path, terms of use etc.) without a hitch (most of the time, sometimes the blue screen pops up then too). Then the actual installation will start and everything will be fine for about a minute or 2 (about 5%-15% of the actual installation will be complete) and then the blue screen pops up with the "machine_check_exception" error and I'll have to restart. If I keep the same path I can continue the installation from where I left off and eventually it will finish installing after several forced restarts. This happens with any type of software that is on a CD; game or otherwise. It's relatively consistent too as to how long the installation will go before the forced restart. I've tried several things to get rid of the error message and nothing has worked. I did a Memtest on my RAM and it was fine and I also put the 2 RAM sticks in different slots; I upped the voltage on the RAM by .1V and then by .2V and that seemed to let the installations go longer before I got the blue screen, but then when I tried to up it by .3V and it stayed the same, so right now my RAM is running at 2.1V; and I went into startup and recovery in windows and had it stop doing memory dumps and unchecked "Write an event to the system log", "Send an administrative alert" and "Automatically restart". Also my IDE setup is: primary master = CDRW/DVD ROM combo drive, and primary slave = 250GB hard drive. I also have another IDE hard drive, but it has a SATA adapter on it and is plugged in that way. Both Hard Drives are made by Western Digital and the CD drive is made by Samsung. Sorry for the long post guys. Thanks in advance for any and all help! Here are my system specs if you need them:

CPU: Intel QX6800
RAM: 4GB
ASUS Striker Extreme motherboard
Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 8800 Ultra
OS: Win XP Pro SP2

Hello and welcome to Techspot.

The first thing I`d recommend is changing the order of your drives thus:

Primary master=The hard drive you have Windows installed on.
Primary slave=Your slave hard drive.
Secondary master=Your CDRW/DVD combo drive.

Your will need to set the jumpers on the drives accordingly.

See if that has any effect.

Also, I suggest you return your ram voltages to their default settings.

Regards Howard :wave: :wave:

Hardware error that cannot be rectified... often is a memory module failure, or an overclocking error. There is no short cut. You have to check things out one at a time. Possibly an optical drive failure, or if you are a gamer, you may have some of your settings out of balance. Swing back your various settings, such as voltages, to where you can start from scratch... Easier to go back to base, then to adjust downward.

Thanks for the help guys. I put the RAM back to factory settings (that was the only thing I over clocked), and I made my CD drive a primary slave (shared with the hard drive with my OS on it) rather then a master and everything seems to work fine now.

It would be better to make the CD/ the secondary master or slave on it's on IDE channel and not on the same channel as your main HDD which would be primary master.

I wish I could, but unfortunately my motherboard only has one IDE plug on it. I may get another IDE to SATA adapter for my second hardrive and just have both my hard drives be SATA. I did buy an IDE controller at one point to get more plugs for my IDE devices, but it didn't work with Vista (I want to put Vista on as a secondary OS soon). I don't know if having two hard drives on SATA and a CD drive on IDE would be any better though.