We all have our blue screen horror stories. I realize there's no magic cure for this problem, but I want to know if anyone has any suggestions on why this just happened to me and how I can prevent it in the future. Here's the situation:

In February I built my Dad a new PC. The relevant specs are as follows:

ASUS P4C800 Deluxe mobo
P4 3.2 GHz HT CPU
Win XP Pro SP1
120 GB PATA Maxtor HD
1024 MB DDR400 Corsair RAM
GeForce2 Ti 500 (yeah I know, it's not like he does any gaming, though)
430-Watt PSU

Now a couple days ago, out of the blue, he starts it up and bam.. blue screen of death. Now why on earth would this have happened? It's not a huge problem to get it all set up again, but it just leaves me wondering why this would happen to all this new hardware after only a few months (and it's not something I want to fix all the time). No new hardware was added before the crash and nothing was done to it (that I know of) that would promote a bluescreen. My hunch is that Maxtor just sucks, but hopefully not that bad. A brother of mine had already bought that part for him, otherwise I would have used a Western Digital or Seagate. Any suggestions to help me avoid this problem again?

P.S. This just enforces my love for AMD-based systems even further :cool:. Why I strayed away from them for this system, I know not. :(

EDIT: ANSWER FOUND. FOR MORE INFO, SCROLL DOWN TO LOWEST POST.

It would help a lot if you told us what STOP error at the top of the bluescreen was.

Sorry, forgot to mention that. I believe it said something like "PAGE_FAULT_ERROR_something".

Mine seem to have been heat related issue (being summer and all), or from bad BIOS settings.

Checking your memory would be a good first step: http://www.memtest86.com
Note that if errors turn up they may not necessarily mean that your memory is bad; it could be a symptom rather than the problem itself.

I'm gonna go with the fact that you're using a Maxtor hard drive.. I'm not really sure how their newer drives perform, but my past experience with Maxtor has not been pleasurable. I bought a 20gig 7200rpm when they first came out, and 15 days later it kept blue screening and the hard drive made a lovely clicking noise. I got it replaced, bought it from best buy. 5 days later the exact same problem. I called Maxtor and talked to their techs for a few hours and they decided to send me a replacement hard drive from their manufacturer. It got here and within a month I was having the same problems.

Like I said, I'm not too familiar with the performance of their new drives, but based on past experience Maxtor can blow Buyza

I guess two possible causes as mentioned before:

A: overheating. Try to remove the case cover for a while

B: HDD problems. You can try disabling virtual memory and see what happens, 1GB normal memory should be enough for basics till you figure out whats up.

But yea, you can test the memory modules as well, just in case.

Not all bluescreens are cause by hardware though. Could very well be software corruption.

Then again, software corruption can be caused by a bad HDD.

All the times but 1 I have gotten this error it was related to memory.
The other time was years ago with a AMD processor going out.

Like others have said, check your memory. The times I have gotten this error, were because of bad memory.

Unlike others experiences, I have had very good ones with Maxtor drives. Some running far, far beyond their MTBF. I have an old 430mb drive in an old linux box that has been running constantly since the day I got it. The drives that have caused problems for me have always been Western Digital or Fujutisu.

Ack, I sure hope it's not the memory. It'd suck to have to buy another gig of PC3200 :( . I'll take a looksy tho.

But would that error message I got point to the memory (3rd post down)?

Underneath "PAGE_FAULT_ERROR" it's going to have a string of numbers, like:

stop: 0x00000050 (0xEB8F8000, 0x00000001, 0x8053214A, 0x000000)


We need to know what the numbers are. The one at the end of the first 0x are the most important, that gives us what error it is. The other four numbers give us the details about the error.

Then, we'll get this fixed.

Running something like memtest86 in the meantime is a good start, but blaming your Maxtor in the meantime is just silly.

Ok Palimax, here's the info that the bluescreen gives:

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

*** STOP: 0x00000050 (0xCE940000, 0x00000000, 0x8052A403, 0x00000000

http://aumha.org/win5/kbestop.php#0x50 Bunch of x50 error issues there.

Ok, lets take this one step at a time :)

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmd_stp_ccgm.asp

That's the page on what a Stop 0x50 error means.

Here's the important part:


Interpreting the Message

This Stop message has four parameters:


Memory address that caused the fault.
Type of access (0x00000000 = read operation, 0x00000001 = write operation).
If not zero, the instruction address that referenced the address in parameter 0x00000001.
This parameter is reserved (set aside for future use).
Your particular stop 50 is:

*** STOP: 0x00000050 (0xCE940000, 0x00000000, 0x8052A403, 0x00000000)

So, while attempting to READ memory from location CE940000, your machine got an error, saying it couldn't read that segment. Knowing that code running from segment 8052A403 called it isn't too important.

There are two basic causes of this. (a) You have a physical memory problem, or (b) your system, or one of its drivers thinks it should be able to call memory at a location that doesn't actually exist.

You should have, by now, gone an gotten Memtest86 (http://www.memtest86.com/#download1) and run it. I know your computer is broken, but you're posting from this one. Get the burnable ISO version of Memtest86 and let it run on that computer for a while. Make sure you get through ALL of the tests. If you can't make a Memtest86 CD (or floppy, just the CD boots faster, etc) then remove half of your memory and try rebooting your machine.

Bad memory isn't always caused by bad memory (WHAT?!?!). Ok, seriously though, a lot of times its caused by bad motherboard timings -- I have memory that won't run at the specified speed, and I have to turn down the timings on one of my comptuers to keep it from blowing up in spectacular ways. Make sure your memory isn't going faster than it should be.

Also, a number of factors like heat and power could influence your memory, but you probably wouldn't have such an easily repeatable error. If it was heat, you'd blow up in different ways at different places (probably).

As to case (b), where your memory is good but you're referencing it incorrectly, there's always chance that some NEW driver is at fault. Don't spend one second troubleshooting this until you've let Memtest86 run.

Get back to us.

Ok, I've been running Memtest-86 on the computer in question and it seems to be going fine except.. it's been going through 84 tests (all passed; 0 errors) and still going after 12 hours.. what's wrong here? The readme said a glacially slow Celeron only took 5 hours to complete the test and made no mention of anything over like 8 tests; could this be a clue to the problem? I tried taking out half the memory. I took out and tried each DIMM singally in at least 3 different slots each and still the same bluescreen.

Last time I checked there were only 11 or so tests. I believe it repeats the tests until you tell it to stop.

Gahh, more problems =(

Since Memtest-86 found no problems (went through over 100 tests for some reason, though no errors were found), I decided to go ahead and install a new Windows and hope it doesn't bluescreen again for a long time. Well, after the Win XP setup got finished loading its setup files it said, "checking for previous versions of Windows" and then goes straight to the original bluescreen. I suppose this definitely means that 1 or more pieces of hardware is at fault, but what should I do?

Remove them :)

No, seriously. Your video card could have half-way in the PC, even :) Remove every peripherial except your video card (you can't boot without it - normally), make certain it's plugged in completely, and then disable every other piece of hardware possible in BIOS (like, disable your onboard sound/NIC/USB, et cetera).

I'll try that. I'll also look to see if I have a spare DDR DIMM just to reassure myself that it's not the memory. The bluescreen also suggested that I turn off BIOS memory features such as caching and shadowing, but I didn't see any option(s) like that.. and I thought ASUS boards were pretty BIOS feature/overclock friendly.

If you're over/under/wrong-clocked, that didn't change while you ran Memtest86, so, I wouldn't worry about the memory issue too much.

Seriously, you've got a driver that's probably trying to touch somewhere it shouldn't be. Is there any more textual information in your STOP error? The name of a file? A DLL or VXD, perhaps?

Nope, absolutely no file names listed. I have a feeling that it's GOT to be a hardware error though, as it stops a new Win XP Pro installation cold in its tracks.

Answer found, finally. It turns out it was that flipping Maxtor drive. I plugged in an ancient Western Digital 8.4 gig drive just to see and Windows installation is going as smooth as cream on a fresh chocolate pie. There's obviously a hardware fault with that stupid Maxtor drive, which I'm guessing is the boot sector. Now to see if their warranty is as faulty as their drives... Thank you all for your help, I greatly appreciate all that I've learned from your posts. I even ordered a Windows Bluescreen T-shirt to represent the sum of my experiences over the years. Again, thanks.