A mish mash of Errors: What's bad in my system?

ThatsAgood1jay

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 21, 2006
Messages
1,029
Hi all,

On Sunday, I was playing Apex Legends, when all the sudden my game crashed, I know there have been some stability issues with the game, so I thought nothing of it.

I rebooted the game, and then before I was even back to the title screen, my machine BSOD'd with a 'page fault in non paged area' error. I rebooted the system, and called it a night.

The next day, I woke up to play some Transistor, and after booting my machine, I found that no app wold open. Windows would respond, but trying to open any app, either from GUI or CMDline would not respond. The system then crashed with the 'IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL' error.

I rebooted into safe mode and updated the video drivers and ran a few checks on my SSD, everything came back fine.

From there, the system became more and more unstable, and each BSOD, the error was different. Sometimes it was PAGE FAULT, sometimes it was 'MEMORY MANAGEMENT', IRQL, or NTFS error.

I began to suspect my system had developed an issue with the RAM. I kicked off MEMTEST86 and let it run to completion, no errors were found. I ran chkdsk on the SSD and no errors were found.

I decided to nuke my windows install, but even attempting to reinstall windows was tricky, I created a fresh install media from Microsoft, and about 50% of the time, after copying files to the SSD, I Would get an error 'not all files present' during the 'getting files ready' state.

After a few attempts, I finally got windows to install, before doing updates, I installed the NVME drivers and Magician software from samsung, and ran CrystalDisk Mark, it ran fine and performance was as expected.

As I began re-installing drivers, the system started BSOD'ing again with the same various errors as before.




Background on the system: Specs are as defined in my sig: Ryzen 1700x, 16gb corsair vengeance, Samsung 960 pro 512gb NVME, MSI 970ME. No overclock on CPU or memory. This system was put together about a year ago, the only component that is old is the Powersupply, it is a hold over from about 2 systems, it is about 11 years old. I know that this is VERY old for a PSU, but it had never shown signs of failing so I just kept rolling with it. It is a PC Power And Cooling SIlencer 750.


My thought is that the PSU is finally letting go and providing inconsistent power, this would explain why the BSOD error is different every time, and why the stability seems to decrease overtime. I plan on replacing it and trying again, if the errors persist, I will attempt to load windows to one of my backup drives to eliminate the SSD as the cause, and if there are still yet issues, remove all but 1 stick of ram to try and isolate if they are causing the problems.

Does that sound like a reasonable plan? thank you for your time in reading about my issue and providing feedback.
 
PSU's are a dime a dozen, try that first. When I had issues installing win10 just recently it was bad RAM.
 
The power supply is the one item in the system that affects everything else and can cause all the symptoms you reported so I would try troubleshooting there first.
 
Update: Went to microcenter and grabbed a Corsair CM850X and threw it in. Still had various issues with failing windows installations, and the Samsung drive would randomly disappear from the drive list when installing windows. I then attempted to install to a spare generic HDD, but still could not get a clean install.

I reset the BIOS settings to default, and pulled 1 stick of ram out leaving 1x8gb stick in. Windows installed perfectly fine on both the regular HDD, and the Samsung NVME drive. I then went back and started manually setting BIOS OC options to optimize the RAM profiles, and reinstalled the second stick of memory. As of last night the system was perfectly stable, but I still need to run a full memtest86 and prime95 pass.

I think what happened was the PSU failing which caused the windows corruption, but that also caused the BIOS to at some point get reset to non-optimized settings for the ram, which caused all the re-installation issues and stability problems.

Thanks for the feedback!

P.S. This whole ordeal reminded me how terrible ASRock documentation is, is there a motherboard brand that actually has a useful owners manual for their motherboard?
 
Back
Top