hardware joy

[cellio]

Thus far I've been unsuccessful in getting the new machine to talk to the digital camera. I'm awaiting a response from tech support for the camera. Aside from that, the new machine is behaving splendidly so far.

My old machine (called, for the nonce, Bouncy) is now failing in the exact same way its predecessor (Doornail) did: after increasingly-shorter periods of uptime, it reboots and, more often than not, produces a blue screen. Attempts to reboot at that point always fail; turning the machine off for a couple hours and then trying again gets a short-lived boot. This says "overheating" to me, but it's not appreciably quieter than normal, so I'm guessing the fan is still running. All the usual precautions have been in place all along -- UPS, antivirus, automatic updates (OS and virus), safe computing practices... I don't get it. If I knew what I was looking for I'd pop the cases and look around. But I'm pretty clueless about hardware. (And we just had Bouncy open a couple months ago to poke a graphics card, so I know it's not full of dustbunnies. I don't think Doornail was the last time I powered it up, either.)

The questions in my mind right now are: what happened to Doornail and Bouncy, can it be reversed, and what do I do to prevent it from happening to my new machine?

Could I have a faulty UPS? Could a faulty UPS do damage consistent with these symptoms?

(Oh, and just to clarify: this failure pattern is not the only reason I replaced Bouncy; it's just the final step in a series of annoying failures. The CD burner hasn't worked in months... stuff like that. If it were just a hard drive, that'd be different.)

Comments

Re: Data

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

You're going to hate me.

That string of hex numbers really means something. You can actually search the MS database for them, and frequently get useful info. Each blue screen is likely to have similar numbers if not actually the same. If they're radically different each time it usually points to a driver issue. Was this more noticeable after an update or program installation?

Oh, and what brand/model is it?

This still sounds like an overheating issue, but we need to narrow it down.

At first glance it might be a memory problem, but I need more proof. The memory chips are rather sensitive to the environment and static, and you don't always get a failure message during the boot process - sometimes you get spontaneous reboots and blue screens.

Re: Data

[cellio]

Ah, ok. I thought the hex numbers were pointer locations in volatile memory. I'll get them tonight.

Addendum: at 11:40 I restarted the machine, expecting it to fail quickly. I did nothing other than boot it, wondering if the heavy banging on the disk before had been related. Half an hour later I shut it down normally and went to bed.

Re: Data

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

One of the hex numbers is usually a memory location.

In Win2K the hex numbers are an error (STOP) code (The caps letters are the error class), and various related information. Sometimes they're memory locations, pointers, instructions, etc. It depends on the actual STOP code. Once you search on the STOP code, you can get more info about the other numbers. 99 times out of 100, the secondary numbers don't provide additional useful info for troubleshooting.

Re: Data

[cellio]

Ok, last night I left the machine running for two hours and nothing happened. That's more in keeping with earlier experiences; I think my observations of a couple nights ago were anomolous in terms of timing, though perhaps disk-intensive activity had something to do with it.

Tonight, I turned the machine on before leaving the house for three hours, and I came back to a blue screen. The hex numbers are not the same as before; I would have remembered these ones. Tonight I got:

*** STOP: 0x0000007F (0x00000000 [four of those])
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP

And then straight into the "if this is the first time..." boilerplate. Not much in the way of useful diagnostics there.

The machine is an "AOPEN mid-tower KF45A 300W" (no, I'd never heard of Aopen either). The case also has an AMD sticker on it (CPU???). My paperwork says it was purchased in June 2002. (I was misremembering it as being newer.) I bought it at CompUSA but not quite off the shelf; I think the delay was due to my desire for Windows 2000 Professional instead of XP or ME or whatever they wanted to put on it by default. I think it's otherwise a normal machine of its era. Oh, 256meg of memory.

I tried rebooting from the blue screen and just got a blank screen after the normal boot text that scrolls by quickly (so it never got to the Windows splash screen). Ten minutes later it booted normally, and I'm now waiting for another blue screen.

Here we go!

[cellio]

Ok, just got a spontaneous reboot leading to a blue screen. This is the same error I reported a couple days ago:

*** STOP: 0x0000001E (0xC0000005, 0x804698C8, 0x00000000, 0x10818D70)
KMODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED
*** Address 804698C8 base at 80400000, DateStamp 41773335 - ntoskrnl.exe


Mean anything to you?

Re: Here we go!

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

This may be a silly question, but is your system fully patched?

Re: Here we go!

[cellio]

So far as I know it is. I rely on automatic updates to do the right thing there; is there some command that would tell me the current state?

Re: Here we go!

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

The automatic updates don't do the "recommended" updates, just the "critical" ones. In itself, this isn't bad, but you should probably use Internet Explorer to go to www.windowsupdate.com. This will tell you what patches are still neded on your machine, critical or not.

I asked this only because a number of Microsoft's internal documents mention the STOP error can occur if a certain patch is not applied. But, like always, Microsoft doesn't claim this is a 100% bandaid.