Caviar Green WD10EARS problems, need advice

[Bobbyjoe]

In February of this year, I purchased all new parts to build a computer with. I bought everything including monitor/peripherals from a well established and local distributor in my area. I bought the parts in person and this isn’t the first time I have purchased parts there.

I built a computer roughly 4 years ago with parts purchased from this distributor, and I have had zero issues with that computer in the last 4 years. It still runs like a champ.

Now, this new computer I build went together without any problems, I installed windows 7 Home Premium 32 bit (the same OS I use on my other machine) and I had been using the computer for 3 months to do light gaming (some MMO titles), watch movies, listen to music, and surf the internet. Three months into ownership/usage of the computer, I started to get blue screens, referencing the infamous KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR and promptly went about the normal methods for trouble shooting OS problems.

Each BSOD I got seemed to be from a different driver, whether it was ntkrnlpa.exe, ntkrnlmp.exe, ataport.sys, ect, ect, ect. I checked cables, drivers, sata ports, evertying, trying to troubleshoot. Eventually, I ended up wiping the entire drive and re installing everything, including the partitions.

That didn’t fix it, so I ran the WDLG utility from windows, and it came back with bad sectors and an error 08 report, unable to fix them. So I decided to RMA the drive, since it was still under warranty, and got a new one shipped out within a couple weeks.

I got it approx a month ago, partitioned it into C/D drives, installed windows, updated to SP1, installed Firefox, started installing games I play, media I watch/listen to, and everything seemed great all month. A few days ago, I got a random BSOD. It happened right after Updating World of Warcraft, which I have installed on my D partition. 

So I promptly updated windows, I ran CCleaner, made sure everything was up to date as far as addons go. I got another BSOD referencing rdyboost.sys (which I don’t use) and then went into the command prompt to manually disable rdyboost.sys error reporting.

That seemed to work for a couple days, but then I have been getting BSODs all day today, and they are referencing pagefile.sys. So I rand checkdisk from repair console twice, which found bad file clusters both times, and repaired them. I am still getting BSODs, and decided to run WDLG again. 

It found bad sectors in an extended test, but was unable to repair them reporting error code 08. I haven’t tried to repair them from DOS becuase I just got done spending 4 hours testing it to find errors to begin with. However, I am not unwilling to try it from DOS if there is hopes of fixing the drive.

A few things to note:

• I set my page file up for each partition to be 5.7gigs, as I have 4 gigs of ram installed.

• I only get BSOD when I play World of Warcraft.

• When I play wow, I usually have music playing on Foobar2000, a light audio utility for Windows.

• Just before I get a BSOD the music will cut out for about 5-15 seconds, and wow may or may not freeze up for the same duration.

• I can do anything else but play world of warcraft, and my computer will work perfectly.

I really don’t want to RMA another hard drive, and I understand that all hard drives have bad sectors. I also understand that Windows is supposed to map out and allocate file space around bad sectors upon installation, and I am wondering if it just isn’t doing that in this case.

Any suggestions?

[Bobbyjoe]

UPDATE:

So I ran the repair utility again, from DoS this time.

First it ran the Quick Test and reported an error code 07 ‘read element error.’ Then it ran an extended test, and came back with an error code 0223 ‘Drive repaired Successfully.’

I am going to see if that has fixed my BSOD issues. Will post updates.

[Bobbyjoe]

So after running the WDLG utility again, fixing the errors, the BSODs haven’t stopped. I even got a stop error telling me an installed program failed to run because the file needed wasn’t installed.

Right now I am running a clean install of win 7 home premium 32, without any updates installed. I have only installed a couple programs, and the freeze thing keeps happening frequently, while playing wow + running Foobar. I am currently reinstalling wow in a new directory to see if that makes a difference.

Any thoughts from the community would be great.

[Mike_R]

What is the error code in the bottom left corner in the BSOD… Don’t tell me its 0x0000077 :smileyvery-happy:

[Mike_R]

Sorry I didn’t notice your earlier posts where you stated that the cause was KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR, which is the error code 0x0000077…

I am using windows XP and have a PC which is roughly about 8 years old. I ran WinDbg on the Minidump files (a small portion of memory which windows xp dumps on the hard drive in case of a stop error) and it reported that the most likely cause of the crashes is the HDD… btw I have exactly the same HDD, sorry for a little sloppy writing I’m tired its 1:22 AM here where i live… get back tu ya later

[Bobbyjoe]

Ok, so after weeks of messing around with my computer, testing different components/setups, I think I finally found out what was causing all the problems.

 I installed windows Home Premium 32 bit OS, running on 4 gb of DDR3 10600 ram (windows/BIOS sees all of it) and a 2.8 ghz Dual core CPU. I had to disable Speedstep and S.M.A.R.T. in the BIOS, as well as drive indexing in Windows.It turns out that some PSUs and CPUs aren’t compatible with Speedstep (which is enabled by default) with my mobo. Since I disabled it, as well as those other things, I haven’t had a single freeze or BSOD. I have been runing strong for nearly 24 hours without any problems, and so far so good.

I will update this in another couple days to confirm that my issues are indeed fixed.

[Bobbyjoe]

So a few days have passed since my last post, and my problems do seem to be fixed. I have been pushing my comp hard for the past few days (much harder than I was able to prevously) and all is well.

No BSODs