Machine Check Exception help

[TheBlank]

Ran into this this morning (on my day off, of course) and I was hoping you guys might be able to shed some light on it as what I'm finding online is rather cobbled together and guesswork for the most part.

I use my desktop as a media server, sending movies and episodes to my laptop over the network to be played on my HDTV. Left a playlist running last night, but when I woke up there was an error on the HDTV. I made my way to the desktop to see what was going on, only to find the system completely locked. No mouse, no keyboard, frozen alert balloons telling me about windows updates.

So, I reboot. First post, it makes it all the way to the JMicron checks, and then freezes. Second boot, Windows attempts to start but just ends up sitting there. Third attempt, the same results.

So I pop in my Windows DVD to try and get a repair going so I can at least get at the main hard drive, and while it's starting up the repair option, I get a BSOD:

MACHINE CHECK EXCEPTION

STOP: 0x0000009C (0x00000000, 0xFFFFF88003901C70, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)

Google searching this results in suggestions of Overheat, CPU failure, RAM failure, underpowered PSU, Hard drive failure, GPU failure... in other words "It's hardware, but we can't be more helpful than that"

Tried to boot yet again, and this time it boots right into windows, but my third Hard drive is inexplicably missing. Reboot does not solve this issue. So I power down, reseat all cables, remove the second hard drive from the swap bay, and boot the machine. The missing hard drive is loaded without issue. Another power down and re-installation of the second hard drive also loads without issue.

Looking at my event logs, I see nothing listed for last night. Only an improper shutdown this morning when I had to hard kill it, and then several listings of this nature:

Performance power management features on processor 0 in group 0 are disabled due to a firmware problem. Check with the computer manufacturer for updated firmware.

This error occurs for all Processor groups several times since the machine was successfully booted. Looking through my log, it has not happened before.

Also, on a possibly related note, my machine has done something weird ever since it was first powered on. If the power switch is turned off on the PSU, or the plug removed, or a power outage occurs, it does not boot smoothly. It will start to power on for about half a second and turn off. About one to two seconds later it will try to power itself back on without prompting and either succeed, or start the process over again. This cycle can repeat once, twice, or three times before it starts up as if nothing happened. And any time the machine is turned on again without a power interruption, this strange cycle does not occur.

Starting to think my machine is depressed and bi-polar...

Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated. I've already experienced a hard drive controller failure on my last machine with great information loss... I really don't want to have to go through that again.

...and yes, I am backing up yet again to my RAID file server as we speak.

TIA

 

[PTNL]

Start with this sticky, and see if it narrows things down.

 

[TheBlank]

Thanks, I'd already done a bunch on that list. Once my backup is complete I'll start on the others I haven't tried.

 

[fury]

My best first guesses are a CPU or PSU that has gone or is going bad. Do you have any spares of either one that you can swap in to see if it eliminates the problem?

Try a LiveCD or bootable stress test disk to rule out random bits going awry on the hard drive (though, that Windows DVD wouldn't have run into that blue screen if there weren't something wrong differently than the hard drive)

edit: I see you're watercooling, if the system in question is the one in your sig. Check the temps, check the thermal goop, check the liquid if you haven't already