Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations IamaSherpa on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

How to cope with unstable instability

Status
Not open for further replies.

mymou

Technical User
May 21, 2001
355
GB
Hi All

Have a homegrown system with lots of nice components which worked fine for a number of months. However, it has developed serious instability issues – which make the system unusable.

With a certain degree of certainty the computer crashes with a blue screen and reboots. This doesn’t appear to be associated with any particular program: it often occurs at log on (with the computer freezing – rather than a blue screen); Microsoft games seem to crash regularly with an exception error; even while booting up I can get a blue screen (endless restarting); even safe mode can be difficult to access.

When I get a blue screen, it can come up with a few different error messages (which I only have a few seconds to read) but one does come up very often: ‘PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA’.

I have tried new memory and using different memory banks.

I have tried using old images to restore the system – with a limited amount of success (the computer may work normally for a few hours or even weeks). Once the crashes start, they become more and more regular.

Even on a clean install – I often get error while I’m trying to install – or blue screens immediately after (sometimes).

One very annoying issue is that on moving the computer to support specialists – the issue (sometimes) disappears and I get the computer back in exactly the same state.

I have no experience in dealing with such unpredictable problems and I need help to come up with an approach that will enable to find out what is causing the problem.

Please help!!

Stew

OS: WinXP
MB: Gigabyte 8PE667Ultra
Gainward GF4 4600 Powerpack 750 or something
SB Audigy Platinum
Western Digital Caviar 400JB * 2 on raid


 
Completely unpredictable lockups are generaly caused by over-heating. Take the side off the case and put like a desk fan blowing into the computer and see what happens when you install the OS or something.
 
Your problems may be caused by many things. I would suspect
power related. It could be a failing power supply, intermitent power loads on your circuit or a sagging mobo with an extra stand-off under it that is starting to cause
a short. It could be memory related or a failing device such as a CDRom drive. I would suspect the restarts are due to intermitent power lose though.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top