blue screens on boot up

[touchmyichi]

Hey everyone, so I tried for a really long time to fix this for myself and I think its time for me to give up and come here for advice. After running quite well for a year my system suddenly hit a pretty strange error. When I boot into windows most of the time during the boot up process or briefly after the system turns on a blue screen will quickly come up and my computer will restart. On my last mobo my lan had failed me and I guessed that it was a problem with my sata ports. I lowered my OC, reinstalled again, and played with the SATA config but the problem kept recurring. I just set up a new gigabyte DS3L which was terrific for the past few days and the problem never occurred. Now however, it's having the same error. It's to the point now where I can't even get into windows safe mode without it occurring.

Another thing to add- I bought a new 500 gb hard drive and installed windows on it for my new setup. My old primary hard drive with all of its old existing data from the previous installation is being used as a secondary drive. Could this possibly be a virus caused by that? Also, I have the 500 gb with a single 120 gb ntfs partition so I could later install another OS on it. For some reason though, I can't shake the feeling that this is hardware based.

Here's the specs of my setup-
Gigabyte DS3L
E4300 (had it clocked at 2.8-3, but hadn't had a problem w/ this setting before)
2x1 Patriot extreme performance DDR2 (PC-5200)
Galaxy 8800GT
Enermax 485W Noisetaker (too little?)
Samsung 500gb Sata 2, Maxtor 500 gb sata 2, seagate 200 gb ATA
Creative x-fi (had the caps on this modded w/ some funky electric paper on it to prevent the jitter from the computer).
a few 120mm fans inside a P180

 

[Uncle Bob]

Check the SATA mode in the bios, if it's set to something like enhanced or ahci or raid, try setting it to compatible or ide mode.

 

[corkyg]

While you're at it - read the details of the blue screen - they usually point to the problem.

 

[touchmyichi]

uncle bob- yeah, I tried both modes before but with no avail.

corkyg- it's one of those blue screens that pops up for a split second before the computer restarts. Maybe I need to take a timed picture of it w/ my DSLR or something

 

[corkyg]

Try the Pause/Break key as soon as the BSOD pops up.

 

[touchmyichi]

alright I got a STOP: 0x0000007F (0x00000008, 0x80042000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000) code which according to the google looks like it is indeed a hardware problem.

Edit: Hmm interesting, the 0x00000008 makes it seem a little more specifically a double fault. I found this about the problem- "Double fault: Your system usually handles two exceptions serially. However, there are some exceptions that cannot be handled serially and a double fault occurs. Hardware problems related to RAM, bus or CPU and kernel stack overflows are major causes of these problems." I tried using a single stick of both of my two dimms and the problem still occured so I doubt that was it. Since I replaced the board does that mean my E4300 is most likely the problem? Does anyone think that could be possible?

 

[Uncle Bob]

You don't list an optical drive but I'll assume you've got one. If you disconnect the SATA drives, can you boot the Windows CD. Alternatively, (in fact better idea) try one of those Linux CD's like Ubuntu etc which will run a full GUI OS from the CD,
this will allow you to determine if there is a fault with the MB/CPU or RAM

If you can boot from CD, then try re-connecting the SATA drives one by one