Holy shit bluescreens.

Flippy_D

Okay, so.

I've been having some problems. Playing games is making me bluescreen. Not at any specific point, or even at any specific action. Neither does it appear to be limited to any particular game. Nor are the various bluescreens uniform.

My personal opinion is that my paging file is damaged somehow. Help a brother out.

Salient points:

My Steam folder is not in its original partition, meaning there is a possibility of bad filepaths (but non-steam games also bluescreen).

I sent off my

old HDD to be tested and I've been told it's ok, to my surprise.

I recently had a lot of upheaval on my system, due to reinstalling windows, formatting, etc. Perhaps importantly, Windows is now on a different drive.

My BIOS are pretty rudimentary. I see no way to disable shading or caching on them.

Bluescreen 1:
atapi.sys bluescreen. Missing file. I checked in system32 and indeed, atapi was missing. I am inclined to believe that this one was related to Alcohol180%, a virtual drive program that can apparently lock atapi down erroneously. I uninstalled it, then downloaded the file and put it in the proper directory. I had one more crash relating to atapi, but after that I renamed the file to be the right case (instead of all uppercase) and haven't had an atapi crash since. I am cautiously claiming this one to be fixed, but I think it's still relevent.

Bluescreen 2:
0x000000F4. Mostly seems due to the installation of windows on a slave drive. But I'm S-ATA. I don't get it. I thought it made no difference.

Bluescreen 3:
0x00000077 (or 7A). This one seems more interesting.

STOP Messages 0x00000077 and 0x0000007A are related kernel traps that are caused when the operating system tries to load a page into memory from the paging file on the hard disk, but cannot access the page because of either a software or hardware failure.

Also cropped up as a problem was a delayed write error issue, on my old hard drive (again, here's the topic).

I'm now most inclined to believe that I have a corrupt page file, but what do you guys think? I'll try to answer any more questions you have.

bowen

One or many numbers of your hardware is faulty. I'd suspect your hard drive, but since you've said it passed a fitness test (which I have no idea the quality of) it is probably your motherboard, or quite possibly your cables.

Flippy_D

Well, it was the other hard drive I sent off, because that was the one with the write errors. This one seemed (seemed) healthy.

What makes you think hardware issues? It doesn't crash outside of gaming.

bowen

Gaming tends to put stress on your hardware, ramps up electrical usage on the board and supply, it also activates features of your drivers that aren't always in use. It's not uncommon to have these sorts of problems coming from one of a number different pieces of hardware.

Now that you mention that it only happens in gaming, I'd be very surprised if it wasn't Hard drive, ram, or power supply related.

Flippy_D

It's not PSU or RAM, I don't think. Memtest checked out okay and the PSU is a very nice Tagan that's worked fine since I got it - whereas this problem is pretty new.

This is my older hard drive... Western Digital. About.. er.. 4 years old.

It also, now, has my windows installation on it. What do you recommend?

Put in newer HDD, partition it into two, install windows on one of the partitions, transfer stuff across, format old one, continue using just to see?

Is there any way I can test it? The HDD I mean.

bowen

Well you're unable to to access the pagefile so it could be memory or hard drive. But probably the hard drive.

If you have a spare one give it a shot, I don't know if I'd recommend new hardware just for this. I used to get error codes like this because of my sound card a few years back, so you can imagine how ridiculously hard it is to troubleshoot blue screens.