Kernel BSOD

[apdrummer]

I built my computer with help from people at this site last year (specs in sig). I have had this BSOD problem since almost the very beginning (oh, I'm running win. xp sp2 32bit). It has come and gone, making me thing I fixed it. I get 2 different types of BSOD's a KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR and a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR. I know these have to do with memory, but my ram has not shown any errors the three times I've run memtest86 overnight. I do overclock my E6300, but my memory is at stock speed, and I throttled the CPU down as well, to see if that was causing instability.

I have 2 hard drives. I started out with them in a RAID array and got mostly kernel data bsods. I got them In the middle of games - oblivion, bf2, etc. So I split the array and installed xp on one hdd. I continued to get errors in crysis, bf2142, and others. So, I switched HDD's and installed xp on the other one, and now after 2 bsod's during the World in Conflict Demo xp will not boot completely, flashing a BSOD screen and restarting. I can't pause in time to see what it is, it's too fast.

Everytime I get the bsod I hear my hard drive shut off a few seconds before the bsod. I think it was an error in the paging file, but I don't think it was caused by my HDD's, because I don't think there are very good odds of getting 2 hard drives that work only most of the time (i.e. not totally dead), and have the same problem in both. which is why I think it's the motherboard. 680i's were known to have SATA problems, and yes I had the latest BIOS, but maybe I had an additional hardware sata controller problem when under load.

When I got the bsod's (the kernel data ones) they showed ftdisk.sys, and ACPI.sys. Apperently ACPI lets the OS control the power supply, maybe my PSU is somehow partially broken?

I apologize for the essay, but I've put up with this problem forever and I'd really like some advice on what to do next. I think I've tried everything that doesn't involve replacing components. Thank you so much for any help/advice/suggestions on this! Oh, and my temps were fine.

EDIT: I also could not get any dump files because windows couldn't dump to a hard drive that turned itself off (or something turned it off).

 

[sPlAtOiD]

It sounds like flaky Hard drives to me. Have you ever ran a fdisk on them to wipe them completely delete all the partitions and rebuild the partitions from scratch. You can use a windows 98 boot disk to do this. I'm not really sure this would help but it's worth a try. Both FDISK AND ACPI.SYS point to the hard drives.

 

[apdrummer]

I used DBAN to nuke them and the windows install disk to rebuild the partitions when reinstalling xp. Recently I ran the Western Digital diagnostic program or whatever, and fixed some bad sectors/etc. but it did no good. I don't know how many times I ran chkdisk on them, rarely finding errors, and supposedly fixing those few errors succesfully.

 

[atomic tofu]

i think it's the mobo
any bios updates for it

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Either SATA controller is on the failing side, the SATA cable could be bent to much or has a bad connection, or the HDD is failing...

 

[apdrummer]

Seems it'd have to be sata controller, I've tried replacing the cables, and ports on the mobo to no avail.

hmm... there does seem to be a BIOS update, with an ominous "Fix for SATA disk drives"

EDIT: When I looked again at the BIOS page it seems the "fix for SATA disk drives" was included in my bios version, the only new thing is "updated wolfdale cpu microcode." That won't help me any.....

Is a new motherboard in order? should I try a reinstall on a new hard drive and make sure it's not the HDD's before I go for the mobo? Thanks a lot for the help, I was totally out of ideas.

 

[atomic tofu]

try it again with a single drive, standard non raid XP install....fresh and clean and don't do anything non standard...that is, when you are trying to troubleshoot...keep it simple

install Xp on another HD using this same system, do not try to run any disk emulators or mounters...and see if you have any issues

 

[apdrummer]

This last install I tried disconnecting the other drive, single partition, complete new install after 3 hard drive overwrites (DBAN DoD - with no errors).

When looking at new BIOS I think I updated them wrong last time (I didn't restore to defaults after update) so I will try again after re-updating the BIOS and with what you said, single hard drive clean install.

 

[apdrummer]

It did not help. I had a Kernel_stack_inpage_error when I woke up this morning. I had set it to run the crysis cpu benchmark all night long. So, should I purchase a new hard drive or motherboard first?

 

[apdrummer]

I just tried rolling back my SATA drivers, so instead of using the ones included in the 680i drivers installer I'm using the ones included in windows xp.

It is very interesting actually. I was running the crysis cpu benchmark for about an hour and I woke up to hear my hard drive turning off, natrually I cussed and went back to sleep, but a couple minutes later it did it again. I got up and saw that the benchmark was still running even though my hard drive was turning off every minute or two. I could return to windows normally without it turning off any more. I'm going to rerun and try for a repeat.

This is really weird, can anyone offer any suggestions?

EDIT: It did it again, just like above. About an hour-1.5 hours into the benchmark the HDD started shutting off. The shut offs were between 2 minutes and 1 and a half minutes apart. when the benchmark loop reset, if the hard drive had shut off during the loop, it took around 20 seconds to start up again. It reset instantly if the hard drive did not shut off during the loop. There were occasional hangs for around 5 seconds each that had no obvious pattern. I alt+F4'd out of the benchmark and xp is now sitting idle, perfectly fine with no hard drive problems, I just installed Filezilla, just as a test, and it was normal. Thanks for any help at all, I'm so confused....