Recently I have got a number of BSOD's. My wife took down the info but lost it so I am slightly in the dark BUT I had a kernel stackign error yesterday. I ran all the usual in safe mode; Spybot, Adaware, CCcleaner, AVG AntiVirus and Aol spyware. I had installed 2 OverClocking progs for MotherBoard and Graphics card (never actually used) so I uninstalled them. I scanned disk for errors and EVERY THING came up ok. I set things going this am again and got the following message: STOP: 0x000000f4 (0x00000003, 0x85d2c6e8, 0x85d2c85c, 0x805c749a) There was no other information as to what could be wrong.Please help as I am lost with out the pc. Many thanks in advance.
Chances are its hardware related. Download and run memtest86 to start with. It isn't always guaranteed to pick every problem, I've seen damaged ram that passed all memtest runs, but when being addressed in windows caused the system to crash. Make sure you memory timings are set to standard settings, not tweaked. Have you had any power spikes on the system that could have damaged the memory. If you don't find a fault with the above test, try removing individual memory modules one at a time, then move memory to the next bank, then try more memory. Also what the power supply like, if its a cheap supply it could be playing up and causing errors. Make sure the CPU is not overheating, keep monitoring the temp to see if its getting too high just before the crash.
I feel your pain. One time, when I just built this PC i'm using now, I frequently got BSOD. I spent 13 straight hours trying to figure out why. Turns out my bios setting was wrong. I had 2 hard drives, I set the first as primary, but for some reason another small boot setting set it up in reverse. Go fig. Best way I can tell you is you have a few options. Recheck your bios settings, all of em. Make sure your hardware is in properly. And check your components step by step. Your hard drive might have also done a brain fart and deleted a critical file, run system recovery and see if that helps. Also check if you can run windows in safe mode. If you can and its fine, than most likely its a windows error. But those are hard to catch. Also try to google, yahoo, lycos, jeeves, etc. your problem. That helped me. Obviously if you put the whole error code it will turn up nothing. Try just searching 0x000000f4, or a few lines of the error code. That will turn up a lot more info. Hope that helps.
Thanks for the quick replys. I had thought about memory issues but normally there is a message in the BSOD pointing that way. Also the memory is dual channel so I thought if one went down it would knock both off? I had a similar problem before and it seemed to be related to a dodgy MBR, but haven't had time to explore that, and the fact that I got a kernel error made me wonder. I tried googleing the kernel error but got more confused ! Anyone with a made for idiots guide to kernels?
from what I can google, looks like an OS problem. I'm assuming you have WINXP. Check this link and follow the steps. http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic35103.html But the first and easiest thing you can try is to restore from an earlier savepoint. That is if this problem just started. I'm sure you either messed something up or you d/led something that messed it up. Try the earliest save point before the problem happened. If that doesnt work, try others. Than I'd reccomend you try the links I posted above. Hope that helps.
Thanks vspede, I had already been to techspot. I fixed the MBR and then ended up reinstalling windows which has sorted out the problem, however I don't know what caused it. I have scanned for virus problems but came up with nothing! Any way thanks for the help and support. Go raibh maith agat.
