Vista - Vast Amount of Blue Screens

Okay I reinstalled Vista, and just went along regular business to check if everything was fixed. So far all is well, except one problem that baffles me. Whenever I start my computer up the screen goes black and nothing happens. So I power off, and reboot and hit "Start Windows Normally" and everything works fine. I got two blue screens on start up since the reinstall, a c5 and a d1. Could this be from my new video card? It was doing this before the reinstall as well. Or could it be because i had dual booted Vista and Windows 7 from the same hard drive (Which i stopped so all i have now is Vista.) Again, thanks for all your help!

Harblkips, that looks like a bad driver. Something is trying to load at startup, and it doesn't like it. Did this happen on the first boot?

~Lordbob

Yep, First Boot, then second one works fine. I had a feeling it was the driver, this one game I play crashes randomly because the "display driver stopped responding" guaranteed to happen every time I play. I know I have the latest version of the driver, from nvidia at least, maybe theres one from Asus?

Don't be tempted to assume that all errors, and in particular all crashes, stem from the same underlying root cause on your machine. They _might_, or they might not. It's impossible to tell without a closer look.

Also, troubleshooting BSoDs by just looking at stop codes (that first 0xA, 0xD1, ox50... number) is for the most part an exercise in pointless frustration. Yes, there are some stop codes which inevitably point at borked hardware (0x9c for example), but the vast majority do not fall into that category - they might be either software or hardware, and nobody can tell for sure without more info.

In your \Windows\minidump folder, you might find memory dump (*.dmp) files corresponding to these latest, post-rebuild crashes. If you zip up and upload a few of the latest ones, it may be possible to give you a better guess/analysis

*Grumbles*
Your right...

~Lordbob

I looked at them myself (I don't know anything about them I just wanted a gander) they seem to be about the same thing. All about a file called ntoskrnl.exe. Anyway, here they are.

No obvious answers in there I'm afraid, or at least they're not obvious to me

Two of the dumps show what's called a pool corruption problem. Something is mangling memory, except that by the time that use of the corrupted data leads to a crash, the original culprit is long gone.

I'd suggest following Flavius's excellent advice here:

http://www.vistax64.com/973966-post8.html

Once you're running in that special mode, you may get even more BSoDs for a while, but the difference is that the dumps may reveal the memory corruptor at the time it's doing "bad".

It still could be hardware though.

Hey H2SO4, how do you read the dump? I was just getting no file extension...

~Lordbob

Hey Lordbob


Here's a "walkthrough":

How to read the small memory dump files that Windows creates for debugging



Except some of those instructions are ugly and dated and they'll lead to tears, so here's what I suggest you do instead:

1) Download that debugger package and "custom" install it to c:\debuggers

2) Run "c:\debuggers\windbg -IA" That'll register the WinDBG debugger as the default handler for DMP files.

3) Just double-click any DMP file. It should now open in WinDBG. Eventually it'll give you a prompt.

4) type (with that leading full stop): .symfix+ c:\SymCache

5) .reload

6) !analyze -v


That !analyze command is an automated mechanism which does its best to tell you what actually caused the crash. In say 50% of software-caused crashes, it's smart enough to find the answer.

Have fun with it

Thanks. Have some rep.

~Lordbob

(oops, or not.)