Hi everyone. I am experiencing randoms BSOD errors in my new Windows Vista system. The pc is a AMD Athlon 4400 X2, 2Gb RAM 667 MHz Kingstom in Dual Channel, mother ASRock ALiveNF5-eSATA2+ with Nforce 520 chipset, video XFX 8600Gt Fatal1ty Edition, two hard discs (one PATA and one SATA) and a SATA DVD Burner, runining on Windows Vista 64 bits Ultimate.
The crashes started while playing Crysis, and after that the computer sometimes just didn't boot into windows. I tested memory with Memtest and found nothing. Run Orthos (using max mem) and crashed almost instantly. I suspected a problem with hard drives and pagefiles (i had one in the sata drive and one in the pata hard disk) because crashed appear to happen under high memory demand and on disk read or write operations, so I configured the system to use only one pagefile in the sata disk. After this the pc worked fine, i run orthos 15 minutes without error, played 30 min STALKER, and then played one hour of Crysis, but when i closed the game, again another bsod. So i guess i don't solve anything and i don't have a clue of what is hapening.
I attached the last minidumps, can someone please help me? Any idea will be more than welcome. Thank you
P.D.: forgive my bad english...

Attached Files

minidump.zip (97.3 KB, 1 views)

I have a simular problem with Crysis. It only happens when I exit the game. I dont get a dump but the entire system is frozen...I can't even get the task manager up. I suspect Crysis is the issue and not Vista. I decided to just deal with it until an update for Crysis comes out since I have no other problems at all with the OS.

I think i solved the problem. I conected the sata hard disk to another port and reinstaled ide drivers and i think everything is ok now. However if anyone can depure the minidumps I upload in order to confirm the source of the errors, I'll be more than grateful. Jhill3d, I used to have problems with Crysis and other demanding games on vista, I solved many of them upgrading my video card driver and installing several hotfixes recomended by nvidia. I don´t know if your card is nvidia, but the hotfixes are for vista and should work on any card. I cant post the link becouse i have less than 3 posts, but you can find the hotfixes in the driver download page of nvidia.
Good luck.

Most of the dumps are exactly the same, with crashing at Ntfs.sys. So it does look to be a hard drive related problem. I would have suggested updating the SATA driver, but only do that if the crashes return.

Thanks peterdiva for taking the time to analyse my dumps. I indeed tried to update sata controller driver, but instaling the drivers available in the nvidia page does not change the defualt driver loaded by windows (standard IDE controller or similar for both ide channels) and any attemp to install them manually end with the system unable to boot (a system restore solves this). Is there a way to install oficial nvidia sata driver and reemplace microsoft's one? Can i have problems in the future if I left installed the "standard IDE controllers"? (I have my sata drivers configured as non-Raid in the BIOS). Thanks

It's actually better to use Windows' IDE drivers as the Nvidia ones can cause problems. SATA is different than IDE, it's listed in the device manager under SCSI and RAID Controllers. Don't mess with it if it's stopped crashing.