Various BSODs in Win7 - Help needed

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ROCKETR

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I arrived home this evening and booted my PC as I always do. Everything was working stupendously and then out of the blue, my PC's speakers began to shriek banshee-esque ear piercing noises. I immediately unplug the speakers from my soundcard and the sound goes away. However, I return to my PC to realize that it is completely frozen.

I then reboot my PC (at least attempt to) and nothing will POST. I investigate by taking off one of the sides of the case and turning it on again. My motherboard, soundcard, GPU and hard drives all load...save for my CPU's heatsink (Thermaltake V1) fan...I found this very odd. I then unplugged the power to the heatsink's fan from the motherboard and plug it into another port for the CPU fan. I plug everything back in and it POSTS now. However, as it is loading, I get a BSOD.

Code: 
STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}
0x00000000 (0xc0000221 0x001003F0)

I try to restart again and it asks me if I want to launch Windows Repair or Start Windows Normally. I select Windows Repair and it BSODs on that giving me:

Code: 
c000021 Unknown Hard Error
\SystemRoot\System32\ntdll.dll

This BSOD re-ocurred nearly everytime I tried booting Windows Repair (yes, even when I tried a Repair disc I had made from Windows backup that was said to restore my system image that I save on my external hard drive. The other BSOD that occurred (that I still recall) was one saying the usual BSOD information and had "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA" as the error.

I am currently about to run Memtest86+ overnight to see if I get any results. I have had previous hardware mishaps in the past such as a secondary drive disappearing. I changed the SATA port and updated the firmware and that has fixed it since (been about a year and a half). Last October I had my PC just randomly BSOD and refuse to boot. I ran Memtest back then and no errors came after 5 hours or so. If I recall correctly, I re-installed Windows Vista and it worked fine after that.

This is my first BSOD in Windows 7 after 9+ months of use and it saddens me greatly. :(

With my repair CD not working or seemingly able to load my system image as it cannot even boot into Windows Repair...is my last resort going to be to try a Windows reinstall? This will be my 4th re-format this year with all of the Beta, RC, retail, etc and I'd rather stay away from that if I could as it gets old doing it too often.
 
Ran Memtest86+ last night and got 3106 errors in the first ten minutes on Test 5, lol. I assume this means I should take out all memory and test each stick?
 
Last edited:
ROCKETR said:
Ran Memtest86+ last night and got 3106 errors in the first ten minutes on Test 5, lol. I assume this means I should take out all memory and test each stick?
Click to expand...

Yes, it looks like a ram error. See if you can find out which sticks are bad.
 
caniba said:
Yes, it looks like a ram error. See if you can find out which sticks are bad.
Click to expand...

Thank you for your reply. I'll test the sticks tonight when I get home. It still doesn't explain why my CPU fan was not working which I think could have overheated the CPU and caused my PC to suddenly crash like that.

Is it possible for such a thing to corrupt a Windows install AND damage other hardware such as RAM?
 
ROCKETR said:
Thank you for your reply. I'll test the sticks tonight when I get home. It still doesn't explain why my CPU fan was not working which I think could have overheated the CPU and caused my PC to suddenly crash like that.

Is it possible for such a thing to corrupt a Windows install AND damage other hardware such as RAM?
Click to expand...

Possibly. However I'd bet that the eVGA mobo you have was the cause of RAM problems, corrupt Windows install, and overheated CPus since those are many of the same problems that people had with the 680i chipset.
 
Danny Bui said:
Possibly. However I'd bet that the eVGA mobo you have was the cause of RAM problems, corrupt Windows install, and overheated CPus since those are many of the same problems that people had with the 680i chipset.
Click to expand...

Interesting. I wanted to think it was the motherboard, but the oddness of the fact that it creates some sort of problem, gets resolved, then happens a year later is just ridiculous.

Would you have any recommendations, Danny? Should I look into getting a replacement motherboard? Buy a different motherboard altogether? Check the RAM first? Etc
 
Ehh, check the RAM first. RMA it if you have to. Also try another CPU fan to see if it's a mobo or HSF issue.
 
Danny Bui said:
Ehh, check the RAM first. RMA it if you have to. Also try another CPU fan to see if it's a mobo or HSF issue.
Click to expand...

Will do. Curious, if it weren't a RAM issue then why would there be errors (and so many of them) showing up on the Memtest?
 
ROCKETR said:
Will do. Curious, if it weren't a RAM issue then why would there be errors (and so many of them) showing up on the Memtest?
Click to expand...

The 680i chipset was well known for giving RAM too much or too little voltage. Hence the error. In fact, a few 680i motherboards outright killed the RAM
 
Danny Bui said:
The 680i chipset was well known for giving RAM too much or too little voltage. Hence the error. In fact, a few 680i motherboards outright killed the RAM
Click to expand...

I assume there isn't any way to correct this other than to try a RMA or another motherboard?
 
So I have just experienced one of the weirdest things ever. I came home and just decided to boot again and see how everything goes. Same story of BSODs.

I took out all but one of my memory sticks (have 4x1GB) and was going to start running MemTest. I stepped away from my PC for a second while letting it boot and realized that I had forgotten to change it to boot from CD. Well I come back to my old Windows install running in perfect fashion. I figured that it was one of the sticks were faulty.

Just for kicks though, I decided to try all 4 again. So far they have worked flawlessly...and I am back running Windows...

I'll update if anything happens *fingers crossed*

I still have a feeling that everything isn't alright though. (Gut feeling that you guys are correct with it being the motherboard is the source of the problems)
 
That chipset/board was known more for its problems than anything else. NVIDIA Core2 chipsets weren't really a great idea, but rather the only option if you wanted to run SLI w/ a Core2 -- unfortunately, it took them several tries, and even with the 780i, it took a couple more tries until the FTW model was actually worth recommending.
 
Would you recommend that I call EVGA and explain what has been happening and see if I can get a replacement of sorts? I have a feeling that the motherboard is still faulty since this has happened in the past but always sort of fixed itself.
 
Why call? just submit for an RMA due to intermittent memory (fails memtest) and HDD (corrupt data) issues.
 
Alright so EVGA would not take the RMA request and said that they believe my problem is with my memory.

After a couple days of talking with support, I was then asked to submit a support ticket in which they asked me to do various tasks for them. They asked me to set the RAM to Corsair-specified clocks, timings, and voltages, however everytime I do that, I get BSODs. This process took a couple weeks due to my heavy traveling during the holidays.

I began to wonder why my RAM was failing so hard whenever I did this. No matter what, the failed if they were not set to "Auto" for everything in the BIOS. I investigated further and found that my RAM is actually 2 different versions. 2 sticks at one version and 2 sticks for another. They all had the same timings and clocks but the voltages labeled on them were different. Would this likely be the cause of all my problems?
 
... probably. RMA the higher voltage RAM with Corsair and ask for a lower voltage kit to match your other kit -- or vice versa. Crucial did this for me with my Ballistix kits, so I assume Corsair would do the same.
 
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