Computer keeps crashing...

[ShadowTigerPK]

Hi,

I'm running into a problem with my system. Randomly - usually overnight - and practically every day - it restarts, but when it comes up it appears to lose its boot order because it comes back up to a black screen with a blinking cursor.

If I turn it off and turn it on again I can get into BIOS. If I go in and check the boot order it looks fine, and then if I save and close (and it tells me I haven't changed anything) it boots back into Windows just fine. It will reboot and shutdown normally when I tell it to.

I tried clearing CMOS (with the jumpers) and I updated to the latest BIOS and drivers. I also went through all the settings and manually set it as conservatively as I could (no auto-overclock, no VM support, etc.). It went about four days without doing it but this morning it happened again.

(I should add: when it boots, it still says "Overclock: 15%" even though I have overclocking turned off and when I check the speed from Windows it looks like it's running at stock.)

Pretty sure it's not overheating. It's rarely above 40C under load.

I'm not sure how to diagnose the issue further. Any help would be appreciated. Googling for this gives me a bunch of posts on how to get Windows to boot back up but nothing about how to keep it from happening except "don't overclock so hard."

Here're my specs:

• ASUS Z170-A bios version 1702 (on-board sound and intel gigabit ethernet)
• Intel Core i5-6500 (3.2GHz)
• Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO CPU Cooler
• Kingston HyperX FURY Black 16GB Kit (2x8GB) 2133MHz DDR4 Non-ECC CL14 (HX421C14FBK2/16)
• Sapphire Flex Radeon HD 7950 3GB 384-Bit GDDR5 PCIE 3.0 (100352FLEX-2)
• Corsair HX-650W power supply
• Crucial MX-100 512GB SSD (Windows boot drive; I also have a non-SSD data drive)
• Windows 10 Pro latest patches (10.0.10586) x64

Thanks!!!
Peter

 

[UsandThem]

First thing you need to do is:

Right click on Start -- Control Panel -- System and Security -- Security and Maintenance -- View Reliability Report.

This should show any issues and crashes. Maybe you can see if on a day an update was installed, you started experiencing issues.

After that, you can download and run this:

http://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed

It can look at your mini-dump files that are created to maybe narrow down issues.

Outside of that, you can load the optimized defaults in your BIOS to see if that fixes your issue. If you aren't overclocking, it's weird that it is showing a 15% overclock upon booting.

 

[ShadowTigerPK]

Thanks! I did not know about the Reliability report. Very good to know.

After I wrote my post, I reset to defaults (which means the mobo is now auto-overclocking my CPU, voltages, and memory). So far okay.

When I saw your reply I checked, and sure enough Windows was crashing, it wasn't the overclocking (I think).

It looks like all of the failures going back to April were DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE dumps, either against ntkrnlmp.exe or acpi.sys. They were at all times of day. Looking at the Windows event log I saw a couple "Windows is going to sleep" and "Windows is waking from sleep" messages just before the crash. So I'm guessing some device isn't waking up properly. I don't need my system to sleep so I just disabled it. I will check the drivers again but they were all just updated in February or so. (Not when this started.)

I also checked my SSD and it's happy.

Finally, I ran a system scan (sfc /scannow) and it found that opencl.dll was corrupt. Who knows.

Thanks,
Peter

 

[UsandThem]

Thanks! I did not know about the Reliability report. Very good to know.

After I wrote my post, I reset to defaults (which means the mobo is now auto-overclocking my CPU, voltages, and memory). So far okay.

When I saw your reply I checked, and sure enough Windows was crashing, it wasn't the overclocking (I think).

It looks like all of the failures going back to April were DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE dumps, either against ntkrnlmp.exe or acpi.sys. They were at all times of day. Looking at the Windows event log I saw a couple "Windows is going to sleep" and "Windows is waking from sleep" messages just before the crash. So I'm guessing some device isn't waking up properly. I don't need my system to sleep so I just disabled it. I will check the drivers again but they were all just updated in February or so. (Not when this started.)

I also checked my SSD and it's happy.

Finally, I ran a system scan (sfc /scannow) and it found that opencl.dll was corrupt. Who knows.

Thanks,
Peter

If you still experience any issues, make sure to update your drivers: GPU, chipset, sound, SATA, USB, etc. Asus probably has much newer versions under their support page for the motherboard.

Outside of that, a common thing I see when on computer forums is some Windows 10 update issues. With how they do updates now, it is possible they can release one that causes some system instability for some users. Windows 10 is very much a work in progress at this stage in its life.

Good luck!

 

[Voxata]

Thanks a lot UsandThem, I never knew of this tool. I've always used event viewer which is really messy compared to this reliability graph deal.