bad hdd? HELP!

duffman1

Senior member
Sep 19, 2005
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Ok my computer has been acting realy weird. I keep getting a blue screen of death and my comp will reboot. It says physical memory dump. I thought it was corrupted windows files so i did a registry clean but that did nothing i have no viruses either. I decided to reformat my computer but when installing windows i get the blue screen too. Is this a bad hard drive? or what could be the possible problems?

*EDIT* I set my hardware back to stock still no luck.
 

Luckyboy1

Senior member
Mar 13, 2006
934
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Anything for a Panaflo man!!!

Hey, you drop back to stock clocks on both system, RAM timings and video card oddly enough before reformatting? If not, try the reformat again at stock timings all around before looking for a non-user type problem.
 

unmerited

Member
Dec 24, 2005
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If you reformated and are getting a blue screen, sounds like it might be hardware related. Have you tried running memtest86?


unmerited
 

Luckyboy1

Senior member
Mar 13, 2006
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No bump needed overclocking man! If you try and format while overclocked where you THINK it's stable, but reality is somewhat less forgiving, you will get corrupted files, especially system files and reformatting at those speeds will be FUBAR! How do I know? Been there and done that myself and a much more common problem than you'd ever want to believe. So many people are replacing hard drives only to find out later that is was the overclocking beyond stable all along. I know this sounds odd, but your Cousin Billy's programming will have to encounter hundreds, if not thousands of read/write errors before it will bother with a specific announcement to you that something's porked.

Think of overclocking and read/write errors as trying to communicate with someone who is hard of hearing. If the RAM reads or writes wrong, the system just asks it to do it again. It does this over and over again until it either gets it right, which is usually the case at the point where novice overclockers think they are stable, or it finally logs an error or in severe cases, corrupts a file. If your increase in speeds or tightening of RAM speeds does not give a corresponding increase in performance, this is your first clue that you've gone from the blue and into the black.

This is why I say you have to go by the torture tests run over 8 hours at a time. Any errors at all and you ARE NOT at a stable speeds or timings. Any other interpretation is just interesting information.
 

AMCRambler

Diamond Member
Jan 23, 2001
7,715
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Sounds like bad hardware to me. Try running Memtest per Unmerited's suggestion. Also check the bios and see what voltages you are getting on your rails. Perhaps the power supply is going bad. If those both check out coudl be the drive is going bad. Format it fat32 and boot from a windows 98 boot disk and run scandisk. You can get a boot disk or boot cd image from Bootdisk.com.
 

duffman1

Senior member
Sep 19, 2005
442
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OK i said that i set my computer to stock timings and i was still getting this probelm. if you red my edit. Any other thoughts?
 

Luckyboy1

Senior member
Mar 13, 2006
934
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He's overclocking by a full 30% and for an AMD chip, that's significant. Try and remember that AMD chips get a whole lot more done per cycle and while it may not seem like a stretch, the AMD factor along with the stated RAM timings at those clocks make it so deciding anything hardware is impssible or nearly so without backing off to stock and trying again. If it works at stock, then it IS the overclock that's to blame.