I have up to 15 BSOD crashes daily under Vista Ultimate 32bit and also own a copy of of Vista Ultimate 64bit (both versions being legal OEM) but stopped using it as soon as BSOD crashes caused it to kill windows even after recovery attempts it would not boot back into Vista so have been using my Vista Ultimate OEM 32bit for about 1 year on a PC that was built by someone that sells them on ebay.

The most common BSOD crashes I have are PAGE_NOT_ZERO_VISTA or the IRQL not equal one. When I analyse the dump files using windows debugger the file shows that the program causing this is either page fault error in windows virtual memory, Firefox v2 (not firefox3 yet) or explorer.exe and sometimes kernel. All these relate to driver faults I think even when dump files say explorer.exe was the cause?

I really need help tracing the source of the BSOD crashes. I read something on IRQL uses and that it was one of the top 10 causes of BSOD crashes in windows but my PC is modern enough to have so many IRQL slots for use by hardware and preripherals this should not happen unless the same one is being used by two devices, right....

I have CCleaner installed and it deleted a lot of my dump files unfortunately so only have recent ones. This week has been quiet with BSOD crashes.

I am posting my most recent dump files debug info in text format. I hope someone here can help me trace the source of the cause.

I am using Canon LiDE 600F scanner installed software and drivers and also a Canon LBP 3000 Laser printer which are both compatible with vista.

At this point I want to note that I was having BSOD crashes before I installed my printer and scanner. It is important that I stop these BSOD crashes because it can cause loss of money and hinder work. One other device driver I have is for a Sony Handycam (DCR - SR72E) - USB driver.

Edit: It is unlikely that HDD with degraded performance can cause these BSOD crashes? When I first got my PC with Vista Superfetch thrashed my HDD so much that it damaged it. I noticed this while accessing SMART info of my HDD. Now that it has thrashed my HDD and caused damage it no longer thrashes it as much when superfetch runs. Software called Advanced Vista Optimizer 2008 has HDD monitor and shows my HDD performance status is only 21% with health status being 57% - I almost forgot I had a HDD crash that was reported to windows several months ago but since then no more have happened.

Any way you could post an actual .dmp file?

Here are my 3 recent ones I have. The others were deleted by CCleaner. Thanks for the help.

OK, after looking at these 4, I can say that they're ALL memory corruption errors - some are single bit errors, and some are actually multi-bit memory errors. Vista since the RC1 builds has included memory integrity checking, and I believe that sometime in one of the post-RC1 builds this was actually finalized and included in the product.

First, a little memory management knowledge in case you don't know how this works. This involves pages that are coming from or being placed on the zeroed pages list. A "zeroed" page is a memory page that has been unmapped from virtual memory by the kernel memory manager, and has been placed on a list of available pages in memory that will be available to any process or driver that requests pages for allocation.

The memory integrity checker works, on a high level, as follows - the memory manager first writes zeroes to the page, then checks the page to make sure it's still zeroes. If not, it'll bugcheck. If the page is still zeroes, it goes on the list to be allocated later. When the page is ready to be allocated later, it is again checked to see if it's zeroes before it's reallocated, and if it's not the machine will bugcheck. Your machine is bugchecking on the second check, meaning the pages are being corrupted while they're unused. This is very much not common .

The bugchecks you have sent all include bit errors, meaning that it is quite unlikely that this is a driver problem. While it is possible a driver could potentially cause single-bit memory errors (due to causing a DMA transfer to an incorrect physical address, for instance, or a kernel-mode driver that writes to incorrect virtual addresses, causing pages to be non-zero), it's not likely. I believe back during the betas and RC builds of Vista, customers who reported this error via OCA were actually sent an invite into a program to "help Microsoft test the Windows memory diagnostic tool", if I remember correctly. Almost all of the people who ran this tool on machines that exhibited multi-bit errors found hardware problems on the system, mostly memory problems (I believe it was 75%+, but I don't think Microsoft makes these numbers public anymore as all the beta sites are gone).

At this point, knowing that the problem occurs on a specific machine under both Vista x86 and x64, I would run something like memtest86+ to check the RAM in your box, and also perhaps contact the vendor of the machine to see about any other diagnostic tools they may have. The likelihood that you have some potentially unstable RAM in that machine is fairly high.

Thanks for the verdict on that and also for the advice. I was having trouble logging in - reset my password and still unable to login to this forum but then clicked reply again and even though I was meant to be logged out am now able to post using old password?. Strange. When I registered here there was a problem with the activiation key not matching so another was sent to my email.

I will run some RAM diagnostic checks.

I ran some a few months back and while running in DOS mode non were detected but in windows they were, Now it may be te other way around - I am not totally sure. Will post updates on this. Thanks.

Having trouble burning the memtest software to disc. It is not an ISO as advertised but really an .IMG file that only Nero can burn to disc. And to top this off the gzip file one is just zipped the ISO 2 times over so is useless for me to use. I read on the forum others having problems with this dating back last year. From what I can see the memtest software is 2007 that has been repacked and branded new version but the old version is v3 while v2.1 is advertised as being the latest. Depending on which memtest site you go to that is and I downloaded all of them - they are the same except the dates the files were created.

I am using the ISO precompiled one (really IMG file) and there are two files. Which one do I use?

Both folders or one or none?

I wasted 4 discs on this already, yeah and it looks like I am having a good complain now. Memtest site is very misleading to state that they offer precompiled ISO file as if we could click once and burn it then reboot and use it. Hard luck. 6 dfferent lots of burning software and non work with this file.

Why is there a BOOT.CAT file in one of the folders, should this not be inside the IMG file itself for it to burn to disc to make it bootable at startup? Or am I meant to start decompiling the image file and make this myself as is with the one that was gzipped?

I would just use other software or windows RAM diagnostic tool but it is no good, right?

If you can give me a guide on how to burn to disc to make it work using Nero please do thanks.

Edit: I just came across this:
http://www.ramprobe.com
RAM Probe (formerly OTCOMP Memtest86+) is a free memory diagnostic software suite designed to test your RAM for faults.

Will give it a go if it works.

OK I got the latest ISO file to work (on newer site).

Booted it up and it stopped testing after 1 error.

Unexpected Interrupt - Halting

See attached file for more info. it does say ECC off. I do not think my RAM sticks are ECC so that is what it means I presume. If you can help any more then thanks in advance. I guess I need some new ECC RAM.

Yes, that looks like a physical memory error. Unless that's a server-class machine, the memory is very likely not ECC, so don't worry about that.

Note that overheated RAM or a bad motherboard (or timings that are too aggressive) can cause this. I would definitely consider replacing the RAM, but remember that you should probably contact the OEM that sold you the computer hardware itself to see if they can test the other components as well.

If Memtest86 isn't showing a faulting RAM address highlighted in red, then it may be the processor generating errors.

It's not showing the usual faulting address display.

The processor generating errors tends to show symptoms that are misleading, the distinction of a processor error would be mostly getting an error real early in the test and a vague one. Such as "internal error" for example.


Symptoms of the processor generating errors:

STOP: 0x0000009C MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION

-or-

STOP: 0x0000000A IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

when in Windows, especially when running a 3D game.

______________________________________________


Symptoms of the RAM generating errors:

STOP: 0x00000050 PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA

-or-

STOP: 0x0000004E PFN_LIST_CORRUPT

while in Windows, especially when you launch a defrag.

That is surprising to me also. I have never seen memtest halt during a test... it usually will keep testing on and on (longest I've ran was over 700 hours) and errors appear with big red bars that go across the screen.

I've actually seen this, and it was about a year ago. The person had O/C'ed the processor and memory, and damaged both. Replacing the RAM fixed the errors in the OS, but memtest would still report errors during testing, and those didn't go away until the processor and motherboard was replaced.