Random lock-up issue, Carb wisdom required.

[Gelmir]

I bought and built my rig (in my signature) from someone on Carb a few years back.

Since the start, I experienced random lock-ups of the system. Not regularly, it might happen once a month or not at all for 3 months or 5 times a day, depending on how the PC is feeling on the particular day (almost like a woman I guess).

I can't contribute it to a specific activity. It could happen while it's sitting idling with a screensaver on the screen, while downloading, while playing BF4 or while streaming over the net. So my only conclusion is that it's not network related (happens when idle) or heat related (again idle) or HDD related (again idle).

I tried swapping out the RAM, even added more, and still it locks up. I've done many fresh installs of Win7, still happens. I'm sure it even did it with my previous GFX card, but can't be 100% sure about this.

So, my fellow Carbonites, bestow your wisdom upon me as to what else could contribute to these lock-ups. I realise I haven't supplied much info, but that's because that's pretty much it. No errors, no BSOD, no warnings or recovery messages. It would literally just freeze solid and sit there looking pretty. The image on the screen would stay there and the HDD light will remain on.

All I can think of is a faulty mobo or CPU. Can they cause these issues? Is there a diagnostic to run to test these items cause I don't have spares to swop out, and even if I did, it might look fine but lock up again in 3 weeks time.

 

[souljazk]

1) Test HDD with HDsenitnal.
2)test SSd with SDLife.

This will hopefully rule out those specific components. The fact the HDD light stays on could also be a faulty SATA port on mobo, sata data or sata power port.

3) Enable full BSOd dumps, & MS driver verifier (verify.exe ; this will force BSOD's) when BSOD hits (if it does at all) do not reboot pc until the indicator reaches 100%. Then open crash dumps in verbose mode via the Ms debugger. This can seem complicated, as you may need additional symbols, but it's fairly straight forward once you wrap your head around it. This will drill down & say "probably caused by : xyz".

Sync PC clock with your phone / watch, and when this freeze happens, make a note of the time, to the second... Then check event viewer:

Event Viewer > "Win logs" > "Application" & "system". Also see Event Viewer > "Application and Services logs" > "hardware events"

Use the "filter curent log" on the right to filter for Warnings, Critical and Errors under X time frame. Hope this helps & that I wasn't too vague, if so, my apologies, typing this in hospital, hope this helps with event viewer basics - The Basics About Working with the Event Viewer in Windows ; Windows Event Viewer tips and tricks | TechRadar ; Windows Admin: Using Event Viewer to Troubleshoot Problems .

 

[Gelmir]

Geez, watch out what you ask for, you might just get it !

Thanks dude, lots of Greek in there, but gonna try it and will post what I find (if anything)

 

[Gelmir]

Update:

Ran HDsentinal - drive is 100%
Tried to provoke the BSoD demon by running verifier ... passed without a hitch.
Checked event viewer. It only showed critical errors every time I had to do a hard restart because Windows wasn't shut down properly. It reflected some errors relating to the print manager, but not related to the crashes.

So in other words, my pc is working 100% correctly !



....only to crash mid screensaver 20 minutes later (this time the HDD light wasn't on)


I'm considering replacing the Mobo cause it's the only other thing I can think of that might be contributing to this. Flip it's so frustrating

 

[abs1]

What psu do you currently have, do you have a spare to swop out and test, many people always overlook a quality psu.

Sent from my Redmi Note 2 using Tapatalk

 

[CarboVan]

[MENTION=525]Gelmir[/MENTION] Might be worth just resetting the bios to defaults? Since it was a 2nd hand rig already, previous okes might have played around with volts/ram timings etc.
Also check your power options to make sure its set to High Performance. Your Pc could be shutting things down randomly (to save power) thus causing instability.

I had a frustrating idle-pc-lockup issue on my old Core2Quad system back in the day, which was caused by cpu idle state volts dropping too low, starving the cpu and hard locking in the process.
Good luck!

 

[Gelmir]

I can't remember the specs exactly, but I think it's a modular CoolerMaster 750w. Unfortunately don't have a spare.
Could a PSU contribute to something like this ?

 

[Gelmir]

[MENTION=525]Gelmir[/MENTION] Might be worth just resetting the bios to defaults? Since it was a 2nd hand rig already, previous okes might have played around with volts/ram timings etc.
Also check your power options to make sure its set to High Performance. Your Pc could be shutting things down randomly (to save power) thus causing instability.

I had a frustrating idle-pc-lockup issue on my old Core2Quad system back in the day, which was caused by cpu idle state volts dropping too low, starving the cpu and hard locking in the process.
Good luck!

Will give that a bash thanks !

 

[Sm00thSm0k3]

My money is on a dodgy board but do the BIOS reset as suggested and try another PSU.

 

[Gelmir]

Update:

I reset the BIOS as suggested and didn't have any more issues, until about Saturday. The pc froze again, but this time I managed to get a BSOD, although it didn't do the error dump.
The massage I got was KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR which according to the clever people in the interwebz can mean a failing HDD, corrupt RAM or wiring that's dodgy.

Did a full Memtest86 scan, came back 100%, did a chkdsk /f run, no issues and promptly hanged again.

I have now taken the pc apart, cleaned out all the dust (there was fair amount), changed the SATA and power cables and now checking stability again.

TLDR: Still don't know what's wrong grrrrr

 

[Gelmir]

Final Update:

It seems I managed to identify the issue. I put a different HDD in the machine and reinstalled Win7. Installed BF4 and had the machine running non-stop for about 4 days. One of the days I logged into BF4 test range, left it on and went to work so the system could be under load for a good 9 hours. No issues at all, so my conclusion is that the old HDD is flaky. I can't really prove it, but since I removed it, the crashes stopped.

So in conclusion, even after doing the chkdsk and HDsentinel which came back clean, it still looks like the drive was faulty.

Hopefully this could help someone else in future if they experience a similar issue