Stop Error "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" help?

[MisterW]

This is the third blue screen of death I have gotten, so now I'm trying to figure out what to do about it. This is what it says:

[ QUOTE ]

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

If this is the first time you've seen this stop error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check to make sure any new hardware or software is properly installed. If this is a new installation, ask your hardware or software manufacturer for any windows updates you might need.

If problems continue, disable or remove any newly installed hardware or software. Disable BIOS memory options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use Save Mode to remove or disable components, restart your computer, press F8 to select Advanced Startup Options, and then select Safe Mode.

Technical information:

*** STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000029, 0x00000005, 0x00000001, 0xF7493B2D)

*** Fasttrak.sys - Address F7493B2D base at F7489000, DateStamp 3cec61f6

Beginning dump of physical member
Dumping physical memory to disk:


[/ QUOTE ]

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. I can't remember what I was doing the fist time I got the error, but the second two times I was working on research - running multiple MathCAD computation spreadsheets, several large Excel files (about 30 megs each), streaming internet music, loading webpages, chatting on AIM, and referencing a large adobe acrobat file.

Could it be that I was running too much stuff and my computer crashed? It's been nearly a year since I've installed anything (new motherboard, memory, backup internal hard disk), and the most recent software I've installed is MathCAD about 4 months ago.

The stop error said something about Fasttrak.sys, which is an application that monitors the RAID 0 array.

My computer is a P4 2.53 GHz with 1 gig RAM, a 120 GB RAID 0 (two striped 60GB HDDs) which is nearly full, and a 160GB backup internal hard drive. I have more detailed specs if needed.

Thanks in advance!

MisterW

[stabn]

Try updating the drivers for your promise array controller. Possibly flash it's bios if you can and the driver update doesn't help.

[MisterW]

Looks like I have the most recent driver update: WinXP Promise MBFastTrak 133 Lite (tm) Controller V2.0.1020.26 from 5/23/2002. I updated anyway with the same driver just in case, but I'm not sure how to flash the BIOS. Is this the source of the BSOD or could it possibly be something else?

Thanks much

[IndyGuy]

Try the advice from my response to a similar question posted in this forum last month.

[MisterW]

Thanks for your response. I ran Memtest after I searched the forum and found your response yesterday, but I was reluctant to start pulling hardware (step 2 of your advice) since I have no time and must use my computer to complete my Master's research. Seems like a similar problem, but the OP of the quoted thread appears to still have the problem unresolved. The searches I ran on 2+2 and on Google turned up similar problems, but unfortunately I couldn't find a case where the problem was fixed without a fix-all solution like re-installing windows or re-building.

The infrequency of the stop errors is enough to not compel me to try drastic measures to find the problem. For the meantime, I've been neurotically backing everything up and am interested in hearing what might be the source of the problem so I can focus on that. I freed about 7 gigs of hard drive space and updated the driver to the RAID controller, even though it was the same driver. Thanks for your response; do you think that it might be a problem caused by too many programs trying to read/write/save to the array?

[IndyGuy]

As I read your response here, I was wondering why you were so set on it being a RAID issue until I went back and saw fasttrak.sys referenced in the OP. I glossed over that before. That said, you're right that it's probably premature to start pulling hardware (and a full pain in the ass, but often the only way to resolve a BSOD).

I don't have much experience w/ RAID or the Promise controller per se, so the best I can do is speculate, so take this with a grain of salt...

My first guess that it could be a problem with one of the drives on the array or dealing with drives that are almost completely full. I've seen flakiness on non-RAID drives when they get 95+% full, so moving stuff is a good option. None of what you mentioned doing seems disk intensive unless MathCAD is really swapping a lot of stuff to disk.

Assuming the array is your system drive, you might try limiting Windows swap file to a specific size (1.5 or 2 times RAM seems typical) instead of letting it be dynamically resized.

If you can find a utility to test the drives in the array independently, I'd do that. Also, if there's nothing physically wrong with the drives, defragging might be a good stopgap. At least then your writes will be contiguous and there will be less seeking which gives less chance for a stop error.

[MisterW]

IndyGuy, thanks for your advice. I have a feeling it might have had something to do with the fact that I had little free space on the hard drive. It would seem to make sense because the size of the research files grows every day, making them quite substantial - and it was only recently that I received the stop error. Hopefully I won't see it again now that I've freed up space, but it'll be hard to know since it could be days or weeks before the next error might happen (they appear to be very infrequent). I didn't realize you could get a stop error from a nearly full hard drive, so thanks again for your advice - hopefully all is well now.

[IndyGuy]

[ QUOTE ]
I didn't realize you could get a stop error from a nearly full hard drive, so thanks again for your advice - hopefully all is well now.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, you shouldn't get a stop error from a nearly full drive, but what's supposed to happen doesn't always happen.

If your research files are really that large and growing quickly, then you probably overtax the system accessing them since they're undoubtably not contiguous. Defragging will help.

Database management systems run into the same problem, and their solution is to create a much larger file than currently needed to allow for growth. Then when the file is almost full, it expands significantly more than will be needed (like doubling the size). Creating it all at once ensures it is contiguous. Not knowing anything about MathCAD or your research, I don't know if this is true in your case.

I'd recommend getting all your data off your system drive (at least it sounds like that's how it's configured). DBMS vendors preach that the database files need to be on a separate physical drive for good reason. We can all benefit from doing this for even less disk intensive applications.

Not that I'm any better about actually doing that than you... ;-)