I woke up this morning, turned on my monitor to a bit of a surprise, a blue screen of death. I’ve seen these every month or two since putting in my 2nd Graphics Card(sli) and Sound Card about a year ago, so I wasn’t worried, but those were all irq address errors and went away on a restart. This is different.
After restarting and clicking through the windows login screen the error came up again, or an error did anyway, it seemed to be different each time. I tried it 16-20 times.
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA seemed to be the most common, but it’s not the only one(I wasn’t expecting this to be quite so difficult to fix and didn’t bother to write them all down, unfortunately)
The error address is usually either 0x00000050, or 0x00000000, and a 0x0000007e, and 0x0000008e once or twice as well.
I was able to boot up in safe mode with out difficulty, and it seemed to run fine in that, so I assumed it was not a hardware error and decided to run a windows repair from the boot cd. Big mistake as it turns out.
The repair process got into an endless loop, getting mostly installed, then bsodding on me, again usually with PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA and 0x00000050, but sometimes with no name, and a seemingly random address. Now I can’t get into safe mode even, since windows is only half installed, so I can’t check the minidumps or anything else. Deciding to try a slightly different approach I tried to install a new windows installation rather then repairing the old one, and it’s failed in a somewhat more random way, ie it gets to different depths into the installation before crashing to a bsod, and the bsod never has an error name. And sometimes before the bsod I get a memory can not be written error.
After reading a few other threads about here and elsewhere I tried Http://www.memtest86.com/ ‘s memory tester. The results were…. interesting. Within 40 seconds or so of running Memtest-86 I have over 150k errors(all of the Err-Bits are 0000XX00(the two Xs)) This kind of leads me to suspect the memory tester might not be giving me reliable results. I could be wrong but I do not believe the windows installation would get half-way though if the memory was that corrupt, or that I would have been able to get into and run around in windows safe mode. For that matter, I can’t imagine what would have damaged the memory, do they just die sometimes? I’ve been using the same ram for fifteen or so months with no problem, and for it to just come out of the blue(ie no hardware, software, or driver changes with the past few weeks) like this seemed to me more like a software problem then hardware.
Nevertheless a hardware problem seems most likely now, so my question is: Is it possible something other then the ram could be causing these problems? The motherboard seems possible to me, and indeed when I built this thing about fifteen months ago I cheaped out on the motherboard after spending all my money on the rest of it.
Also, what could damage the RAM like that? Assuming it is the ram. Or the MoBo assuming it’s that?
After restarting and clicking through the windows login screen the error came up again, or an error did anyway, it seemed to be different each time. I tried it 16-20 times.
PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA seemed to be the most common, but it’s not the only one(I wasn’t expecting this to be quite so difficult to fix and didn’t bother to write them all down, unfortunately)
The error address is usually either 0x00000050, or 0x00000000, and a 0x0000007e, and 0x0000008e once or twice as well.
I was able to boot up in safe mode with out difficulty, and it seemed to run fine in that, so I assumed it was not a hardware error and decided to run a windows repair from the boot cd. Big mistake as it turns out.
The repair process got into an endless loop, getting mostly installed, then bsodding on me, again usually with PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA and 0x00000050, but sometimes with no name, and a seemingly random address. Now I can’t get into safe mode even, since windows is only half installed, so I can’t check the minidumps or anything else. Deciding to try a slightly different approach I tried to install a new windows installation rather then repairing the old one, and it’s failed in a somewhat more random way, ie it gets to different depths into the installation before crashing to a bsod, and the bsod never has an error name. And sometimes before the bsod I get a memory can not be written error.
After reading a few other threads about here and elsewhere I tried Http://www.memtest86.com/ ‘s memory tester. The results were…. interesting. Within 40 seconds or so of running Memtest-86 I have over 150k errors(all of the Err-Bits are 0000XX00(the two Xs)) This kind of leads me to suspect the memory tester might not be giving me reliable results. I could be wrong but I do not believe the windows installation would get half-way though if the memory was that corrupt, or that I would have been able to get into and run around in windows safe mode. For that matter, I can’t imagine what would have damaged the memory, do they just die sometimes? I’ve been using the same ram for fifteen or so months with no problem, and for it to just come out of the blue(ie no hardware, software, or driver changes with the past few weeks) like this seemed to me more like a software problem then hardware.
Nevertheless a hardware problem seems most likely now, so my question is: Is it possible something other then the ram could be causing these problems? The motherboard seems possible to me, and indeed when I built this thing about fifteen months ago I cheaped out on the motherboard after spending all my money on the rest of it.
Also, what could damage the RAM like that? Assuming it is the ram. Or the MoBo assuming it’s that?
. I'm more curious as to what causes memory to go bad, so i can try to avoid it from happening in the future.
