Random Crashes / BSOD

Draciot

Draciot

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Draciot
My brother's PC is having some weird problems, we've tried everything we could think of and nothing has worked. Here are the details:


OS: Windows XP Home: SP3
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 3.0
GPU: GeForce 7600 GS
Motherboard: Asus P4P800-E
Memory: 1GB DDR400 SD RAM

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL
0x000000D1 (0x00000024, 0x0000005, 0x00000000, 0xBAF6E90A)
atapi.sys

It started getting random BSOD about a week ago. A few times it crashed/reset without BSOD or error messages. We tried everything we could think of with no success. No errors in memory according to Memtest86, no new hardware or software, and it runs fine in safe mode. Did a clean install of XP with SP3, but it’s still getting the same d1 error.


After updating sound card drivers we got a different error:
Win32k.sys The driver mistakenly marked a part of its image pagable instead of nonpagable.
0x000000D3

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Did you recently upgrade anything?
 
Now we can't even get into Windows without booting in safe mode. BSOD appears before the Windows loading screen.

The error was:

atapi.sys
0x000000BE
 
that's a device driver error, something has overwritten it and is giving it mismanaged commands. you could try uninstalling your keyboard or mouse if they are usb, in safe mode, and seeing if windows boots that way. if it doesn't solve it continue unstalling components until your system boots into windows.

then update drivers to latest versions (NOT the ones from windows site, they are 2-3 months behind on drivers) and reboot

could also be a bad spot in a stick of ram, in which case you have 2 options
1. try it in a different ram slot
2. buy new sticks (ddr 400 is starting to jack in price)

EDIT: should also mention, do not uninstall drivers for your hard drives, cpus, usb, system devices or ata controllers, you will be very sad if you do (requires windows reinstall)
 
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johnno25 said:
that's a device driver error, something has overwritten it and is giving it mismanaged commands. you could try uninstalling your keyboard or mouse if they are usb, in safe mode, and seeing if windows boots that way. if it doesn't solve it continue unstalling components until your system boots into windows.

then update drivers to latest versions (NOT the ones from windows site, they are 2-3 months behind on drivers) and reboot

could also be a bad spot in a stick of ram, in which case you have 2 options
1. try it in a different ram slot
2. buy new sticks (ddr 400 is starting to jack in price)

EDIT: should also mention, do not uninstall drivers for your hard drives, cpus, usb, system devices or ata controllers, you will be very sad if you do (requires windows reinstall)
Click to expand...
We're going to try this when we get some time, but how could drivers be causing the error even after reformatting and reinstalling windows? It crashed literally right after the reinstall. A couple minutes after the install was finished, before installing any drivers, we got the BSOD. At first we assumed it was a software problem, because there are no crashes in Safe Mode, but if it is a software problem, how could it persist even after reformatting?
 
atapi refers to hard drives and/or cdrom. otherwise known as ata packet interface. you could try to boot without your cd drive connected. if it works then, its your cd drive, obviously. or even the drivers associated with these parts
 
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if it's crashing even after a complete reinstall, my bet would be a bad spot in a stick of ram. ram is accessed by every drive in the system, and the likely culprit is that atapi.sys attempts to write the bad area in the ram during boot, causing the file to be corrupted when windows attempts to retrieve it.

i would also try what masterorion suggested, and if it indeed does boot and not bsod again, rip that drive out and upgrade to a DVD drive :p
 
Ok, update time.

We are able to get back into Windows now, it stopped BSODing before booting up, we don't know why. We thought perhaps something was wrong with his storage HD (the one he didn't reformat), so we installed Data Lifeguard Tools. It instantly said that he did not have the correct software to handle drives larger than 130gb and updated/restarted. We thought that was going to fix it, three hours later we got the BSOD again.

We ran Memtest86 for about 10 hours and it never found anything wrong, but just to be sure we switched ram with eachother. He still gets the BSOD and mine is working fine. So it's not the ram.

At the moment Data Lifeguard Tools are scanning the hard drives, it has about 15 hours left I believe. If nothing is found there, we'll try messing with the optical drives. He has no CD drive, only a DVD ROM and a DVD burner; but the burner has been dead for over a year, so now that you mention it that seems like the obvious place to start. Hopefully that's the source. I'll post again after we've tried it (most likely sometime tomorrow).
 
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We unplugged the dead DVD Burner and started the PC up again. Almost immediately we got the BSOD again, but with a new error. This time it says that usb.sys is what caused the error. The Microsoft error report suggested updating the BIOS to fix the problem, but that's kind of risky. We can't do it in safe mode, and if the PC crashes while updating the BIOS we'd have another rather large problem.
 
hmmmmmm

how old is your mainboard?
my wife's pc did something very similar about 3 weeks before the mainboard blew up.
 
The motherboard? About 4 years old I believe.
 
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