Help would be greatly appreciated on this one. As of late yesterday afternoon, my computer has been unable to boot. I had WoW, iTunes and AIM running and I was given a random BSOD. I was irked, but figured nothing was wrong. I rebooted, and everything was fine. Opened the same three programs, about 20 minutes later, another BSOD, same STOP error. I rebooted, and decided that something had to be going on, and so I tried to run in Safe Mode. A string of script ran down the screen and the system restarted, as if I had never pressed enter on Safe Mode. I can now get about 20-30 seconds through the Windows XP Home Professional splash screen loading bar before I BSOD. I can not access my desktop or log in to any user. I'd like to defrag, but I can't access anything. I can not get in through Debugging Mode, Regular Run or Safe Mode. I'm currently away from home and gave up trying last night after about 2 hours. Hopefully I'll be able to at least get in and sniff around when I get home, but it's highly doubtable. Any ideas? I'm not entirely opposed to reformatting, as I have most of my work posted online as it is, but I'd like to avoid it. (Thanks in advance.)

Hi,

I think this could be WoW related but I have no direct experience with it.

Can you edit the thread title to add WoW? You may get a fast, accurate response that way.

Cheers,

Taff.

Thanks for the response. WoW added to the title. =P

Do the following two standard diagnostic steps:

A. Run Memtest

1. Go to www.memtest.org and download the latest ISO version. It is free and perfectly safe.

2. Burn to a CD.

3. Place CD in your drive and reboot with CD in drive. (You might have to place your drive as first bootable in your BIOS) The test will take over.

4. 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.

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

6. 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.


B. Update Your Video Card Drivers

1. Download Driver Cleaner Pro (free version) to your desktop screen and install.

2. Download the latest diver(s) for your video card but don't install them.

3. Uninstall your video card drivers and reboot your PC into Safe Mode. Run Driver Cleaner Pro. If it doesn't find any video card drivers that is quite okay.

4. Reboot and install new video card drivers.


** Let us know the results of both steps.

So it's definitely WoW related. I booted up when I got home, it ran fine, I got on WoW, and as soon as things got too busy on screen, BSOD.

Okay, then do step B and let us know if that resolves your issue.

Alright, so I followed step B last night and it seemed to work at first. My computer in general seemed to run faster and I figured it was a great fix. Booted up WoW, entered a raid (which involves a ton on the screen at once) and was fine. I figured everything was fixed and was ready to come sing your praises. But once again, as soon as I alt-tabbed into Firefox, BSOD, and an inability to boot up. This selective shutdown has me very frustrated. I'm ready to pull out the parts and buy myself a nice iMac with the proceeds.

I want you to attach your five latest minidump files.

My Computer > C Drive > Windows Folder > Minidump Folder > Minidump Files.

It is these files that we need (not the folder). Attach to your next post. Notice the Manage Attachments button at the bottom when you go to post the next time. You can Zip up to five files per Zip. Please do us a favor and don’t Zip each one individually.

Here you go.

Attached Files

Minidump.zip (124.7 KB, 1 views)

All errors are 0x8E and these are almost always caused by hardware and are particurlarly a sign of memory corruption which two of them specificically cited as the cause of your crashes.

Look at my first post response and follow the directions about running Memtest. This takes a long time. But if you start getting errors before reaching 7 Passes then go to step 6.

* Get back to us with your results.

So...I'm thinking this may not be good. Running on over 500k errors before 1 pass is complete.

LOL! An understatement if I ever read one.

Yeah, I would say we've found your problem.

I'm running individual stick tests now. It got frightening so I turned it off with all in. 1.2 million before the pass meter even moved, frightening.

That is astonishing! I know a lot of people that have had a high number of errors but I think you've taken the prize.

There isn't anything to be frightened of because, again, your OS han't even engaged.

Do it one stick at a time and as soon as you get errors switch RAM sticks. By the way, what is the make of your RAM and how much do you have installed?

I'd like my prize after all this. My malfunctioning piece of RAM was a Samsung 512 MB factory shipped Dell stick of DDR-2. The two working pieces (that I have testing together right now) are 2GB each, from Crucial.

Crucial is one of the largest makers of memory in the world.

Alright, so after removing my two factory-shipped 512 sticks, my computer is running great. Thank you for all of your help!

Great! Glad to see you resolved your issue. Corrupted memory will cause all kinds of headaches and I have seen it countless times throw out errors with all kinds of codes that seemingly point elsewhere.

And now you've got a memtest disk for future diagnostic work if need be.