Please help me! Blue Screen Problem

[guitarbloke]

Hi everyone,

Sorry to bother you, but I’m totally at my wits end and wondered if you had time you might be able to sling me over any suggestions about this!

My PC at home is running XP Pro with SP2 installed, It’s not running a great deal in the background, AVG and the XP firewall are always on but that’s pretty much it nothing else major. It’s been running perfectly for about 6 months, until Friday when it failed to boot. It just sat on the XP “loading” splash screen, the loading bar was moving across the bottom. After about 10 minutes of it sitting there I rebooted it. Same thing happened. After the third reboot, I finally got to the desktop although it took 8 minutes, and then gave me a BSoD.

The codes from the Blue Screen were : 0x000000F4 (0x00000003, 0x87FA6CC0, 0x87FA6D34, 0x805D11F8)

Which I googled but am still none the wiser!

I rebooted and tried one of the other user profiles on the machine and that loaded fine and ran well for about an hour before spontaneously rebooting! Thinking that it might be a profile issue, I deleted and recreated the profile and I managed to get into it and it ran fine for a couple of hours. However it then rebooted itself. I enabled error logging, went to safe mode and checked the log file, but there were loads of entries marked as “did not load xxxxxxxx” so I wasn’t able to see clearly what could have caused the problem.

Ran checkdisk /f overnight but that hasn’t fixed anything.

The event log shows the following error just shortly before each spontaneous reboot/BSoD:

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D" (Event ID: 11)

There are also a number of warning entries around the same time as that error which say:
"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation" (Event ID 51).

The reboots/BSoD’s happen when I’m doing random things, there seems to be no real pattern to it, no consistent time pattern or particular application that I was running at the time.

I have a copy of the .dmp file from the minidump folder if it helps.

Oh and if it’s helpful, I think this all stemmed from some kind of power surge on Friday – the power to the PC just cut for no apparent reason, it was when I restarted it that it began playing up. Doesn’t appear to be a component failure as last night (during the periods when it was working) I ran several hardware intensive games and they were all fine.

I’m all out of ideas, so hopefully you can point me in the right direction!

Thanks in advance

Sean

[peterb]

Welcome to hexus!


Possibilities are

Memory problem
hard drive problem
hard drive controller problem (ie - motherboard)
Powersupply problem.

Download a copy of memtest86+. (You down load an image which you write to CD and then boot off the CD) Leave it running for an hour or so and see if you get any errors.

hard drive failures are harder to detect - it could be corrupted as a result ofthe power failure, in which case a system re-install might be required.

However it is worth defragging the drive and running scandisk to try to repair any inconsitencies in the file system.

If you do have to re-install...


Backup all your data first and have the original install disks, drivers, applicatuion installation disks to hand before you start.

Mobo and PSU problems can only really be checked by substitution of a known good component. Mobo failkure is unlikely - PSU failure a possibility, but try the memtest and disk defragging/scanning tools first.

[guitarbloke]

Thanks Peter, will try Memtest this evening! And thank you for the welcome

Sean

[Paul Adams]

STOP 0xF4 = CRITICAL_OBJECT_TERMINATION

csrss.exe, winlogon.exe, smss.exe are critical processes - if one of those falls over then Windows will bugcheck & restart.

"The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk0\D"
"An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation"
These would certainly imply a disk failure, especially if they are consistent.

Given the 2 symptoms together, I would assume part of the virtual address space of one of the 3 critical objects mentioned has been paged to disk, then when it has been referenced again (to page it in), the paging operation failed and the process has an exception.
That would indicate why it is random.

[guitarbloke]

Thanks Paul, any idea what the best course of resolution for that would be?

[Paul Adams]

If disk is suspect, replacing is generally the best bet.