Hello BSOD my old friend...

Hello there. Have a seat and I'll tell you a tale of woe and sorrow...


I just built this rig, not quite a week ago:

CPU - e8400 @ 3.6
Cooler - Zalman 9700
GPU - XFX 8800GTS 512 @ stock
RAM - 2x2gb OCZ Reaper DDR2 800 @ 5-5-5-15
MOBO -Asus Maximus Formula (BIOS current @ 0907)
PSU - Corsair TX750
HDD - 2 x Seagate 320gb
Case fans - Plenty
OS - Vista 64 Ultimate
Patience - Wearing thin

Anywho, I installed Vista, and was wowed by the eye candy. I mean, I really love the way this OS looks. Aero is fantasmic! Unfortunately, I haven't been stable since day 1.

I have been getting BSODs daily, usually 3 or 4 times a day. Most of the time, it is a Irql_less_not_equal BSOD. I have gotten some others, but can't remember exactly what they were, but the Irql one is the one that seems to love me.

I have run Memtest completely stable for 1 hour, 2 passes. I have run OCCT for an hour stable. I have run Prime95 stable for an hour. At OC of 3.6, my temps at idle ar 35C, at load I see 47C. Nothing to be worried about there. I have even stopped my OC, and ran at stock - yep, the problems remain.

I have the newest nVidia driver 169.25, and the newest chipset drivers. There isn't much rhyme or reason as to when the BSODs occur... It may be during a browsing session of the internet, or it may happen during an installation of some software. I had a BSOD at shutdown, during a restart once.

I don't know if this is hardware related, and I don't imagine that it is. It just "seems" software or driver related to me. It is quirky, in that software kind of way, know what I mean?

I even tried to set up a dual boot. I already had Vista 64 installed, and tried to install XP on the same drive. (I know how to do this, I have the instructions/ writeup on my comp.) When XP was installing, after about 1 min, while it says 'loading windows' or something like that at the bottom of the screen, I got a BSOD, STOP: 0x0000007B (0xF7BD2524, 0xC00000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). I tried to install XP on my other HDD, now this other HDD is brand new, it has only been formatted, nothing has ever been written on it. I got the same STOP message as on the main HDD.

SO... what the heck? Any ideas? If Vista doesn't want to be my pal, fine. But I can't even hangout with my old friend XP anymore, because it refuses to install on either HDD.

Any ideas?


P.S. The thing that really makes me mad is I have been playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. on this comp, and it has worked fine. No BSODs during play. I loaded Oblivion on here this evening, and about 30 minutes into the game, bam, I get a message that Oblivion had to shutdown.

HELP ME MR. WIZARD!!!

Good chance it is driver related.
Boot into safe mode.
Install the drivers from the installation cd you got with your hardware.
Restart you computer.
If the problem still persist look in your error logs and repost.

Hit up Error message when you try to install Windows Vista on a computer that uses more than 3 GB of RAM: "STOP 0x0000000A" and see does that help.

Thanks for the pointers gentlemen.

Roy69 - I'll try that when I get home today.

Scotteq - I tried to install that update, and it said 'This does not apply to your system'. Maybe I already have it installed?


Thanks again. Have a good day.

Yah - That patch is related to certain memory controllers running more than 3GB and Vista. Seems tp pop up fairly often, so tossing that up is a kind of a standard reaction when I see an "IRQL_Not_Equal" error and 0x000000 in the same post.

You can type "Performance Monitor" into your search box. Run that, and you'll be able to access information about what is going wrong. Not always easy to read, but it can help narrow things down.

Well, I just got home, and tried to restart my computer into safe mode. While it was shutting down, my friend BSOD came over to play. This time it was the 'page fault in a non paged area' variety. When I was in safe mode, I couldn't get anything to load from my mobo cd. It kept saying, can't load this or that .dll. I dunno. I am thinking of a fresh install now. Maybe I will just load up XP-Pro and be done with Vista 64 for a bit? I hate to do that, but I'm leaning towards that. Dual boot is ideal, but as I said before, I can't get XP to load.

BTW, if I do try a totally fresh install, do you think it will work? As I mentioned in the 1st post, when I tried to install XP, I got an error during install (BSOD), and it wouldn't load XP.
If I do get a fresh install, how can I reformate this drive. It has 2 partitions on it now, since I partioned it for an xp install. I wouldn't mind having 2 partitions, but only if i can dual boot. If I can't, I would rather have 1 partiiton, and Vista, or preferably XP.

Any thoughts?

Well, I figured out why I couldn't get XP to load. It was a BIOS, sata compatibility issue. Anyways, I switched back to XP, and got rid of Vista 64 for now. This rig's running fine like sweet April wine now. It's nice to have a brand new $2000+ rig run like it should. I'm glad I went back. Maybe I'll try Vista dual-boot when SP1 comes out.

Thanks for all the help!