Vista - Vista BSOD while starting up every 3-4 times

I downloaded the Microsoft Debug Diagnostic Tool to analyse the
memory dump that I have on C:/.

Interesting enough I realized that this dump is from 29 of May ...?!!
and I have had some crashes since then (just an hour ago while booting...)

But even this old one, did not produce anything, since out of 193MB
the analysis tool did not manage to find something important to
start from:
"failed to locate the PEB (Process Environment Block)"

I thought that for every BSOD a new dump is created.
The parameters in the Startup & Recovery tab
are for Kernel dump at system failure and
for overwriting existing dump files.

Why no dump file is created ?

Can this be a hint for the cause of the problem ?

mesa

Take your computer back to the shop.

@roy69
Could you please explain your proposed action ?

What do you see that is so severe ?
It has to be a HW thing...

Hi mesa,

I think that this should explain the reasoning behind Roy's suggestion, which I totally agree with.

You bought your PC in March. It is now August and you have had it for approximately 4 1/2 months. If you have been getting this fault from the beginning, then there is an inherent fault with the PC and it is upto the retailer to put things right. It is clearly 'not fit for purpose'. It sounds as though it could be a faulty hard drive or other component, but it is upto the retailer to determine this. S/he might offer to repair it, but you do not have to accept this if you don't want to - you can demand either a refund or replacement.

The above applies in most countries, but you will need to check the situation as regards the above in your own country, in your case Greece.

Dwarf

Thanks dwarf.

I will check with Toshiba locally, since this laptop
was purchased during a trip to the States.
You know strong Euro, weak dollar.
I makes sense unless you are unlucky as it seems in my case...

I will see what applies to these cases.

Hey guys,

It's now 4-5 days and no BSOD !!! (I am missing this...)
The last change I made after trying out the MS Diagnostic tool
is to change the settings and instead of a full memory dump
configure it for a minidump instead.

Now for some unknown reason this seems to have fixed the BSOD
for the time being!!
That is something that I can only related to disk space
required for dump and system restore if they are the same.

Hi

New chapter in the above issue...

After 20 days of no BSOD (actually the same as my summer
vacations - I suppose BSODs have summer vacations too!),
I got back to the same problem.

Now I believe the triggering event is that the day before yesterday
the computer froze while working, and I was forced to do
a hardware reset.

Nothing was installed lately apart from the latest Vista updates
that was last week I believe.

So it seems the source was not AVG, or the mini/full dump setting.

Now I noticed the following:
I created a new system restore point after getting the system up.
After the restore point was created successfully there was a LOT
of HDD activitiy, without any application running.

I launched the resource monitor and the process writing/reading
was the NT Kernel. There was no network activity at all.
The NT Kernel kept on writing mainly to C:\System Volume Information{...}
for about 8-10 minutes.

I did this two times and it happened in both cases.

Is this behavior normal ? What is the NT Kernel doing with the
System Volume Information ? I can only think of defragmentation,
but then it should not take the same time, in two consecutive runs.

Any ideas.

mesa

it is natural, especially if you are pretty full on your allocated space for System Restore points, or if you have a disk defragmenting program (although, in hindsight, it should not be defragmenting that folder..).

Now, you say it was fine with no errors when you were on vacation - by chance did you take it somewhere else with you? Is you did, that suggests that you either have a power issue or else an Internet connection issue. I'd look at power first.