Blue Screen of Death

[carbonel]

My computer has BSOD'd several times in the past couple of days -- twice three times today. Each time, it occurs without warning. The blue screen appears, and says "KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR" at the top, then the computer restarts.

This can't go on, even though I'm getting paranoid about saving my work.

Any suggestions on a) what the problem is, b) what to do about it, or c) where to take it would be gratefully appreciated.

Note: The computer crashed again while I was in the middle of writing this message. Luckily, LJ remembered most of it. I rebooted into safe mode, and I'm going to try that for a while to see if it makes a difference. I hate safe mode.

Comments

No idea...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

Ghoogle suggests running a chkdsk on the boot drive or any drive with a paging file... Chkdsk /f /r

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms854944.aspx

(My guess is that it won't fix the problem, but it's a cheap thing to do.)

I hate Best Buy's Geek Squad with a burning passion. After that, I have no real clue.

Re: No idea...

[carbonel]

Ghoogle suggests running a chkdsk on the boot drive or any drive with a paging file... Chkdsk /f /r

As it happens, I think I did just that, on the advice of Windows: go to C: drive, right-click on Properties, select the Tools tab, and run error-checking with both "automatically fix file system errors" and "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" checked.

Does that sound like the graphical version of the same thing?

It took a couple of hours, and I didn't see a report; it probably timed out while I was away.

So far no crashes, but that's not particularly diagnostic. But it was an easy first thing to try.

Re: No idea...

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

It's running Scandisk, which is a newer but different version. There are differences, but I'd hafta google it.

Blowing out the dust bunnies is a good idea. I'd also make a rescue disk or thumb drive and a windows install disk if you can.

Does Dell have any utility that can read the drive's SMART (if I got my acronyms right) log/settings/report?

I also have drive caddies one eSATA & USB, Zone just USB. If the drive is failing, cloning it may work, and is easier than a clean install. If it's a bad update or driver, that's not going to help.

[guppiecat]

You could waste weeks dealing with this. It's likely a bad update, corrupted file, corrupted disk or driver problem. So screw it. Pull out your hard drive, put in a brand new drive, re-install Windows, re-install the drivers you need, re-install the basic applications you need to get work done. Transfer your data back and move on with life.

It's not a trivial amount of work, but it is very likely that the whack-a-mole game will take longer and be less likely to result in success.

[carbonel]

Moving computers last time was such a hassle that the new computer sat in my office for over six months before I actually did it. I will grant this may not be entirely rational, but it does fill me with total angst at the thought of going through that again.

The only thing that made it bearable last time was borrowing some magic cable from Pat WINOLJ that made the Windows Update Tool transfer over all my settings. I have no idea how I would do that when it's my c: drive (and not a second computer) that I need to transfer from. I suppose I'd need to do something like pull the drive and use it as a secondary drive in some sort of external holder?

Gah.

[guppiecat]

Odds are high that I have a hard drive adapter thing you could borrow. I know I have one for SATA. I might have one for older drive systems.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

Not nearly enough data. My first guess (based on experience fixing hundreds of computers) would be that it's full of dust kitties. Or the hard drive is failing. Or if something was recently changed (video driver update), that'd do it. Or it's never been defragged and now it's both horribly fragmented and too full to fix. Or a hundred other things.

chkdsk is good advice. So is blowing out the dust kitties. So is buying another drive, doing a fresh install to that, and forgetting about it. However- if it's a hardware thing (besides the dust kitties or the hard drive, anyway) all three of those things might not fix it. So the real questions are:
1) How old is this computer? Is it time for a 'new' one?
2) Do you have $200 to buy a reman two-year off-lease from woot or microcenter or newegg or someplace similar?, and
3) Is it worth $200 and a computer-move to you to completely avoid having to deal with this problem?

[carbonel]

The computer is around three years old, I think. It's a desktop computer from Dell running Windows 7. I know I'll have to go to Windows 8 or 10 sooner or later, but I'd be just fine with later.

It'd definitely be worth $200 to me to avoid having to deal with the problem. On the other hand, the computer-move part was sufficiently traumatic last time (see comment above) that I'd really hate to have to go through that again. Obviously I will if necessary, but it's probably worth it to me to pay someone else to do it.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

I agree with the chkdsk. I'd also check the event logs to see if there is anything useful there.