System encountered uncorrectable hardware error

Hi all,

Let me preface by stating I just recently reformatted from Vista x86 to Vista x64, so I have a generally clean hard drive. I have SP1 and all Recommended and Required security updates, as well as 64-bit versions of all my drivers.

I regularly play World of Warcraft, and usually within 30 minutes of play, I get a BSOD stating "System encountered uncorrectable hardware error" with a stop code of 124. Three-forths of the time I get the BSOD, the other forth of the time it skips the BSOD and restarts the computer. The screen will first freeze for 5-10 seconds before the BSOD or restart happens. I just can't seem to find a remedy for this error. Here's what I've tried so far:

Disabled onboard audio (no onboard video)
Reinstalled all drivers
Ran Windows Update to be certain I have all Vista updates
Updated BIOS
Ran Memtest86+ with no errors
Ran Prime95 for 4 hours with no errors
Physically inspected that all my fans were functioning
Airdusted to assure there were no heating issues

When I had x86 installed, I never got BSODs. So it kind of makes me think somehow one of my drivers is conflicting.

Another problem I'm having which is making this dianostic troublesome is Vista won't generate minidumps when I get a BSOD. I went into my Startup and Recovery settings and have "Write an event to the system log" checkmarked and have it set to write a small memry dump (128 KB) to %SystemRoot%\Minidump. However, when I get a BSOD and go to find this minidump, the folder doesn't exist (C:\Windows\Minidump). After doing a comprehensive search for *.dmp files, the results come back empty. So that certain makes things hard!

Can I view whatever is causing this error in my Event Viewer? When I go and look at my System events, I see one stating I had an improper shutdown at xx:xx:xx, but there's no errors near that time indicating a problem.

If anyone has any idea on how to find the root of this problem I would be very appreciative! Thanks!

jrobinson3k1 said:

...Another problem I'm having which is making this dianostic troublesome is Vista won't generate minidumps when I get a BSOD. I went into my Startup and Recovery settings and have "Write an event to the system log" checkmarked and have it set to write a small memry dump (128 KB) to %SystemRoot%\Minidump. However, when I get a BSOD and go to find this minidump, the folder doesn't exist (C:\Windows\Minidump). After doing a comprehensive search for *.dmp files, the results come back empty. So that certain makes things hard!

Click to expand...

Failure to generate a dump comes down to one of two (main) causes:

- You don't have a sufficiently large pagefile on the boot partition (where \windows lives). The ability to generate a minidump is dependent on the availability of a full kernel dump, and that can only be generated if there's a pagefile on the boot partition (memory is actually dumped into the pagefile and that gets renamed on reboot to memory.dmp). Whether there are other pagefiles is immaterial - there must be a pagefile of at least 500MB or a gig or so on the boot partition if any type of bugcheck dumping is to work.

- The portions of the OS responsible for writing the dump are themselves taken out by the specific nature of the crash. For example, a problem in a volume driver may make it impossible to commit data to the HDD. This is actually fairly rare.

jrobinson3k1 said:

Can I view whatever is causing this error in my Event Viewer? When I go and look at my System events, I see one stating I had an improper shutdown at xx:xx:xx, but there's no errors near that time indicating a problem.

Click to expand...

For most types of BSoDs, the corresponding event is actually fairly useless. However, for 0x124s you can actually dig out the specifics of the hardware error report from the bitmask number logged as part of the event (bugcheck parameters 3 and 4). To do that' you'd have to use the MCAT utility from AMD, something similar from Intel, or you'd have to manually ascertain the meaning of each bit by referring to the Intel/AMD "Machine Check Architecture" spec documents.

In all but a few fringe cases, a STOP 0x124 means exactly what it says - hardware has reported an error and Windows is passing the message along. Therefore, updating drivers and other software maintenance activities are highly unlikely to help.

Thank you for your reply.

I checked on my page file size and it's set at the recommended value (6139 MB) on my boot drive. Should I perhaps increase this? With both WoW and Vista running, it takes a little over 2GB of RAM for both. Though I don't see how that could possibly help, as it seems to happen after a fresh reboot and launch the game as well (so not much in the page file to begin with).

Is it possible I could of messed up something during installation? Such as an improper order on installing drivers? I saw someone mentioned there's a rule of thumb on what order to install drivers but I had never heard of it, thus paid no attention to what order I was installing drivers.

It's late, so I'll have to check your last suggestion referring to extracting bit information (eek!) from the event log tomorrow.

Another thing I should note as well is I only get it playing this one particular game. I doubt this means much though, since if software is causing some sort of error Windows is pretty good about disposing that software rather than crashing the system.