Consistent 0x0000008E (WinXP) BSOD

[mikeymikec]

My wife's PC (admittedly we're going to be building a new one once the replacement board is delivered) consistently produces this BSOD (same STOP code every time) when Google Chrome is started, it asks to restore the previous session, to which I click OK.

This is one of those times that I wasn't so interested I'd probably say "we're building a new one shortly, let's just do a backup and not think any more about it", but what can I say, it's a computer problem and I like to fix things like that

0x0000008E googling tends to suggest bad RAM or a dodgy driver. win32k.sys is always cited in the BIOS.

I tested the RAM overnight with memtest86+ v4.2, and I stress-tested the machine with Orthos (a variation on the theme of Prime95) for half an hour, neither showed any problems.

The important bits of the machine are very old (Athlon XP generation, ASRock K7VT4A Pro board), and apart from the performance issues she's been having with it, it has become very oddly unstable in recent months.

I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that it isn't the PSU because I replaced that after it had become oddly unstable because the PSU fan was labouring, though I suppose that there's a chance that it's that.

The problems it's had:

Onboard LAN intermittently becoming non-functional (can't ping anything, and disabling/re-enabling it gets it working again), so I put in a spare PCI NIC. That issue has stopped happening since.

Graphics card (GeForce 6200 AGP) went completely titsup by the looks of it, graphics corruptions even in the BIOS. Replacing it with a spare ATI 9250 AGP fixed that.

Before and after replacing the graphics card, images on web pages would sometimes come up as pretty gradients of a particular colour.

When resuming from hibernation it sometimes says "a disk read error occurred" and freezes. Reset doesn't fix that, but switching off/on does (usually). I tried updating the RAID driver (JBOD, to support SATA), but it hasn't helped.

There are two disks in it and a DVD drive. The main disk (SATA) has two partitions, and I ran a check on the boot partition. No problems there allegedly. I recently wiped the second disk and ran a quick data backup from the first disk to the second (IDE) as a precaution (I've nagged my wife for years to clear out the second disk - one she used to have as the main disk - so I can set it up as a backup disk).

There aren't any disk errors in the event log, except one for the RAID driver complaining of a timeout.

IMO, the board is failing. FYI, I can't see any dodgy caps on it. It has plenty of ventilation, and is reasonably dust-free.

- edit - Btw, did I say consistent BSOD? I just tried Chrome's restore function again and it worked It did it at least twice though.

 

[unokitty]

Do you think that it is significant that both your onboard NIC and your graphic card have failed? How confident are you of the health of the hard drives?

Just a guess.

How old is your power supply?

Sometimes a power supply that is getting ready to fail can cause a variety of problems.

Best of luck,
Uno

 

[mikeymikec]

Note that I've already stated that I've replaced the PSU recently (a month or two ago), in the middle of these problems. Personally I think that adding a piece of hardware (ie. the PCI NIC) would exacerbate stability issues if the PSU wasn't up to the task. However, the NIC issues have stopped entirely.

I haven't run full checks on the hard disks, but I'd be really surprised that a faulty hard disk could account for graphics corruptions in the BIOS.

 

[Bubbaleone]

0x08E does generally indicate a ram problem. As you've tested your ram and it's OK, that's eliminated. However, win32k.sys being involved every time indicates a system software, not hardware, problem. Run SFC from the command prompt first, then make sure that service pack 3, and the latest patches/updates are installed. If updating doesn't cure it, run a thorough scan for virus/malware. An infection that's altered a system file/s will cause the 0x08E error also.

 

[Steltek]

I'd agree that it sounds likely that the motherboard is slowly dying. However, the fact that it passed Orthos and Memtest makes me also wonder if you might just have a Windows installation problem.

How old is the Windows installation on the machine? It might be time to try a wipe and reinstall. Also, is the BIOS updated to the most recent one available?

Concerning the graphics corruption, I'd try swapping out the video cable before I presume the problem is linked to the instability issue. Does it do the same thing if you try it on another monitor? (I have a flat panel monitor with both DVI and VGA inputs which does the exact same thing if you run it on the DVI input, but switch it over to a standard VGA input and it works fine.)

If you want to try to eliminate Windows as the problem without reinstalling, try booting the machine from a Linux live CD and run it for a few days straight.