Will pay $50 for help

[BradleyHolland]

Will xfer on pokerstars:

PLease help me.

My laptop has worked fine for the year I had it. I was logged in to a hotel provided wifi, and went to the gym. When I came back, my PC was frozen. I reset it, and it is just giving me constant hell. Somehow it is working OK now, it works in spurts, but it will busto soon.

When it resets I sometimes get the message'

Checking C:

Type is NTFS
Volume is dirty
Then a bunch of lines about indexes
Then some CHKDSK stuff'

When my PC actually freezes I get a blue screen. Ive had a couple of different messages.

e.g.

Problem Detected - Windows Shut down

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Technical info

***: (bunch of numbers)

Beginning Dump of Physical memory
Physical memory dump complete


OR

The problem seems to be caused by the following file: ntfs.sys

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

***ntfs.sys.address B9E26583 base at B9E02000, Date Stamp 41107eea

I also get the recommendation:

Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing.

Please please help!

BH

[IndyGuy]

The "Volume is dirty" bit means your filesystem is in an inconsistent state (possibly corrupted). See http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...d.php?t=192763 for more info about that.

I don't know what the exact problem is, but I can take some reasonable guesses and lead you down the path of checking them out. Please bear with this.

The errors you are seeing are consistent with bad memory or corrupt device drivers. I suggest you run memtest86 first and see if that reports any errors (this should take a couple hours). Search this forum for my posts if you need more help with this part.

Next up would be to configure your computer for logging debug information (which it appears you may have already done, since you're getting a dump file). Go to My Computer->right click->Properties->Advanced->Startup and Recovery. You want to enable the Write event to system log and Send administrative alert, and disable the Automatically restart options. Set the dump option to Kernel memory dump, and make sure there's disk space equal to more than the total of your RAM wherever the file is to be saved (by default %SYSTEMROOT%\Memory.dmp). Enable it to overwrite an existing file.

Once you have this dump file, you can either obtain (freely from Microsoft) WinDbg (Windows Debugger), which you can use to see what exactly was happening at the time of the crash. Or you can find somewhere to post the file for others to look at it. Again, search my posts in this forum and you'll see more detail about WinDbg. One of them links to an article walking you through the steps to find the bad driver.

Edit: The inconsistent filesystem state is certainly consistent with the bad memory or driver as well. Windows uses the filesystem as a pagefile when you run low on physical memory. I just wanted to point that out, since my reply sort of glossed over that part of the error.

[BradleyHolland]

re the memtest thing - its really difficult even getting my laptop to work for a couple of hours......

[MowrMowr]

[ QUOTE ]
re the memtest thing - its really difficult even getting my laptop to work for a couple of hours......

[/ QUOTE ]

When you create a memtest CD, the OS doesn't load...everything loads off the CD. You really don't *need* a few hours...if the memory is really bad, there's a good chance it'll start throwing errors in a few minutes. There's also an outside chance the hard drive has bad sectors...have you run a chkdsk? I agree the most likely scenario is failing RAM though.

[IndyGuy]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
re the memtest thing - its really difficult even getting my laptop to work for a couple of hours......

[/ QUOTE ]

When you create a memtest CD, the OS doesn't load...everything loads off the CD. You really don't *need* a few hours...if the memory is really bad, there's a good chance it'll start throwing errors in a few minutes. There's also an outside chance the hard drive has bad sectors...have you run a chkdsk? I agree the most likely scenario is failing RAM though.

[/ QUOTE ]

True. Mine took about 20 min to find errors, but I have a gig of RAM. The more you have, the longer the tests take. It's a battery of tests, so it tries several passes through the memory. Essentially this is so that you can more reliably avoid false negatives; if the memory really is bad, you don't want to think it's okay just because it happened to pass one test once.

Also, you can do it all from a bootable floppy as well; you don't need to burn a CD if you don't want to (just depends what's easier for you).

I'd suggest sitting in front of the computer and keeping an eye on the results though. If it spontaneously locks up or restarts, you'd like to know that there were indeed errors (or not) before restarting the test. You can also configure it to log results I believe, but just monitoring the screen for a bright red error message while watching TV or something isn't too bad. At least you can see that it's making progress.

[BradleyHolland]

Unfortunately I dont think I have a floppy disk, and my cd drive is busto.

[buckslayer80]

Write down "all those numbers" on the blue screen then post them here. I am familiar with the most common ones. It sounds like you may have some corrupt files, or your drive is going bad. Get us that error code.

And a page fault is often failing memory.

[BradleyHolland]

[ QUOTE ]
Write down "all those numbers" on the blue screen then post them here. I am familiar with the most common ones. It sounds like you may have some corrupt files, or your drive is going bad. Get us that error code.

And a page fault is often failing memory.

[/ QUOTE ]

This time I got

KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR

*** STOP: 0x0000007A (0xc0600808, 0xc0000102, 0xC0101510, 0x3E13E804)

[BradleyHolland]

Now IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

0x0000000A (0x91A8A008, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0x8051E9EF)

[hukilai]

It might not be relevant here, but did you try System Restore feature? Try to rollback to a date when you remember it were working normally.

Of course it will not work if you have hardware problem.