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Author Topic: Blue screen of death  (Read 3522 times)

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Nickbat

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Blue screen of death
« on: 26 June 2007, 23:35:31 »
There I was reading markjay's excellent description of 2.6 plenum removal, when ZAP!. The blue screen of death appeared with about three lines of code at the top and the words: Preparing to dump physical memory.
 :o :o
I powered off and rebooted but what the fubar was that all about?


Nick
Using Win 2k Pro
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TheBoy

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #1 on: 27 June 2007, 09:08:20 »
Did you get the stop code?

BSOD is (esp on a patched mature OS) a sign of hardware issues....
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Grumpy old man

Nickbat

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #2 on: 27 June 2007, 09:28:49 »
Quote
Did you get the stop code?

BSOD is (esp on a patched mature OS) a sign of hardware issues....

Not sure what you mean by a stop code, TB. The blue screen came up staightaway with the "preparing to dump physical memory..." message. I'm afraid I panicked a bit as my first thought was a virus.
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TheBoy

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #3 on: 27 June 2007, 09:39:28 »
Quote
Quote
Did you get the stop code?

BSOD is (esp on a patched mature OS) a sign of hardware issues....

Not sure what you mean by a stop code, TB. The blue screen came up staightaway with the "preparing to dump physical memory..." message. I'm afraid I panicked a bit as my first thought was a virus.
The top line would have some numbers, and also the process that caused it.  Also, the dump file will contain the info, along with stack info....

Next time, note the top 2 lines that say STOP 0x0000000A etc etc
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Nickbat

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #4 on: 27 June 2007, 09:41:39 »
Quote
Quote
Quote
Did you get the stop code?

BSOD is (esp on a patched mature OS) a sign of hardware issues....

Not sure what you mean by a stop code, TB. The blue screen came up staightaway with the "preparing to dump physical memory..." message. I'm afraid I panicked a bit as my first thought was a virus.
The top line would have some numbers, and also the process that caused it.  Also, the dump file will contain the info, along with stack info....

Next time, note the top 2 lines that say STOP 0x0000000A etc etc

OK, will do, TB. How easy would it be for a layman to identify the failing hardware from the process code?
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TheBoy

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #5 on: 27 June 2007, 09:44:40 »
Quote
Quote
Quote
Quote
Did you get the stop code?

BSOD is (esp on a patched mature OS) a sign of hardware issues....

Not sure what you mean by a stop code, TB. The blue screen came up staightaway with the "preparing to dump physical memory..." message. I'm afraid I panicked a bit as my first thought was a virus.
The top line would have some numbers, and also the process that caused it.  Also, the dump file will contain the info, along with stack info....

Next time, note the top 2 lines that say STOP 0x0000000A etc etc

OK, will do, TB. How easy would it be for a layman to identify the failing hardware from the process code?
Possibly not, but may help, esp the process name, which may tie it to a device or its driver.

Spurious ones often point to memory (esp if some idiot hasn't worn proper ESP gear when opening case), or on cheap systems (that haven't been zapped by unprotected hands) the PSU.
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Nickbat

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #6 on: 27 June 2007, 09:57:30 »
Went through my event log and found that the PC has recently been recording this error:

The device, \Device\Harddisk1\DR1, has a bad block

Looks like I'll have to scan the drive and lock out the bad block.

Could this be the likely cause of the BSOD?

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Kevin Wood

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #7 on: 27 June 2007, 10:01:18 »
Any unusual noises from the Hard Drive?

If it's starting to go bad I'd be inclined to get a new hard drive ASAP and copy everything over to it while you still can! Modern hard drives have internal strategies to remap bad blocks and this is transparent to the OS. If the OS is starting to see hard drive issues it's bad news. Could still be the drive controller or another hardware issue though.

How old is the drive? If it's more than 2 or 3 years old it's on borrowed time.


Kevin
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Jimbob

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #8 on: 27 June 2007, 10:05:59 »
Sounds familiar, pc was a bit slugish this morning, rebooted and got a SMART alert on bootup,
Hard drive 3 status BAD, Backup and Replace Drive...

New 500GB'er on order already.

Donty worry about the dump physical memory message, just means the pc was going to copy the contents of all your system ram into a file on the hard drive, in case you want to look at it to diagnose the fault, this feature can be turned off if you want. (wont stop the blue screen though)
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Nickbat

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #9 on: 27 June 2007, 10:09:37 »
Quote
Any unusual noises from the Hard Drive?

If it's starting to go bad I'd be inclined to get a new hard drive ASAP and copy everything over to it while you still can! Modern hard drives have internal strategies to remap bad blocks and this is transparent to the OS. If the OS is starting to see hard drive issues it's bad news. Could still be the drive controller or another hardware issue though.

How old is the drive? If it's more than 2 or 3 years old it's on borrowed time.


Kevin

Yes it is, Kevin. It's a doddle to physically change the drive, but copying everything over is something I do not relish (gone are the days of COPY *.*!). Can anyone recommend a good ghost utility to do this? I've got three drives, but I think it is my main C drive with programs on it that's failing.  
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Owen

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #10 on: 27 June 2007, 10:11:15 »
Yup, blue screen always happens when im in the middle of a download, or a match game, but always when im in the middle of summit! >:(
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nixoro

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #11 on: 27 June 2007, 10:12:12 »
I think Nero 7 has a backup facility which may prove useful.

Norton Ghost is the best I have come across so far.
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Kevin Wood

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #12 on: 27 June 2007, 10:21:48 »
Quote
Yes it is, Kevin. It's a doddle to physically change the drive, but copying everything over is something I do not relish (gone are the days of COPY *.*!)

Yes, I know what you mean. However, if the system has started to become unstable as a result of a failing hard drive, I'd say you may have some corrupted files on it. These will be copied to the new drive if you just ghost it so you may still have problems. It might be worth a try, but it might also be a good opportunity to rebuild the system from scratch. This isn't a bad thing to do every so often anyway. Depends how much software you'd need to re-install and if you have the original media.

Documents and the like you can obviously just copy over by installing one of the drives as a slave.

Kevin
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TheBoy

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #13 on: 27 June 2007, 10:54:46 »
If the OS is reporting bad blocks, its because the disk has run out of spare blocks to map out (all disks have bad blocks, but the disk itself remaps to a spare area).  This will cuase a BSOD, often the STOP code will be a 0x00000024.

Norton Ghost (use Enterprise version, and use in DOS, not the Windows junk bit) is pretty good and I use it myself, but TBH, a complete rebuild would be far better. I know that is real hassle, but Windows desktops do get messy after a few months....
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Martin_1962

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Re: Blue screen of death
« Reply #14 on: 27 June 2007, 11:29:50 »
Does drive make matter?

I have used lots of 4 year old drives with no issues.

We had a server at work with a 10 year old drive, started as the original SYS volume and just stayed there update after update
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