Memory conflicts - why???

[flyvholm]

I appear to have a memory conflict on my laptop. I'm using WinXP, and it starts up fine in normal mode, but crashes during startup in safe mode, flashing a blue screen at me for a split second with an IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL message. So I start up in normal mode and use the system info tool to check the memory assignments (even though they are evidently different when starting in safe mode - otherwise it wouldn't crash?). They don't make sense to me, so I send screenshots to HP customer care (which I was trying to resolve an issue with). There's a number of items in the Conflicts/Shared section, so guess what they tell me: "Reinstall your operating system to resolve all the driver issues". A sure and very easy solution for them. Not for me.

So here's the question. The task appears so simple: A number of drivers ask for memory during startup, and I assume it is assigned to them by Windows. How hard can it be not to assign the same piece of memory to two different drivers??? You'd think it was possible to check before assigning a memory range that it is not already assigned and if it is, push to a different range that isn't. And then even worse, afterwards it can give you a list of places where it failed, but not do anything about it! Is it really that hard to arrange or rearrange the memory assignments? Evidently it is, and I hope somebody here can enlighten me as to why this has to be so difficult.

Of course, I will also appreciate advice about how to sort out my memory conflict without having to reinstall everything as HP customer care suggests.

Thanks in advance!

 

[HardcoreRobot]

have you added anything to the laptop (extra cards or anything?) Its definitely a driver problem, but you would think that an out of the box laptop shouldnt have any problems. Have upgraded any drivers recently? If you have, try reverting, and if you havent, try to get up the newest version.

Its possible for many devices to share the same IRQs and work without a problem. Just becuase you see overlap is not the problem, there is something else.

 

[flyvholm]

I have installed and updated a number of drivers along the way. Problem is, I don't know when the conflict started since things work fine in normal mode. I had no clue there was a conflict before now when I tried to start up in safe mode. I've learnt that shared IRQs are no problem on ACPI systems, but there are several other things appearing in the Sharing/Conflicts overview:

Memory Address 0xF0000000-0xF80FFFFF NVIDIA nForce3 AGP Host to PCI Bridge
Memory Address 0xF0000000-0xF80FFFFF NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M

I/O Port 0x00000000-0x00000CF7 PCI bus
I/O Port 0x00000000-0x00000CF7 Direct memory access controller

I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF NVIDIA nForce3 AGP Host to PCI Bridge
I/O Port 0x000003C0-0x000003DF NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M

I/O Port 0x00002000-0x0000203F Motherboard resources
I/O Port 0x00002000-0x0000203F NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management

Memory Address 0xE2000000-0xE2FFFFFF NVIDIA nForce3 AGP Host to PCI Bridge
Memory Address 0xE2000000-0xE2FFFFFF NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M

I/O Port 0x00002040-0x0000207F Motherboard resources
I/O Port 0x00002040-0x0000207F NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management

Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF PCI bus
Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF NVIDIA nForce3 AGP Host to PCI Bridge
Memory Address 0xA0000-0xBFFFF NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M

I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB NVIDIA nForce3 AGP Host to PCI Bridge
I/O Port 0x000003B0-0x000003BB NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M

Memory Address 0xE0100000-0xE17FFFFF PCI standard PCI-to-PCI bridge
Memory Address 0xE0100000-0xE17FFFFF Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller

I/O Port 0x00000062-0x00000062 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Embedded Controller
I/O Port 0x00000062-0x00000062 Motherboard resources

So how do I find out which (if any) of the overlaps cause a conflict, and how do I change the memory assignment? I tried rolling back the NVidia nForce3 driver which is involved in several of the overlaps, but it changed nothing.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: flyvholm
I appear to have a memory conflict on my laptop. I'm using WinXP, and it starts up fine in normal mode, but crashes during startup in safe mode, flashing a blue screen at me for a split second with an IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL message. So I start up in normal mode and use the system info tool to check the memory assignments (even though they are evidently different when starting in safe mode - otherwise it wouldn't crash?). They don't make sense to me, so I send screenshots to HP customer care (which I was trying to resolve an issue with). There's a number of items in the Conflicts/Shared section, so guess what they tell me: "Reinstall your operating system to resolve all the driver issues". A sure and very easy solution for them. Not for me.

So here's the question. The task appears so simple: A number of drivers ask for memory during startup, and I assume it is assigned to them by Windows. How hard can it be not to assign the same piece of memory to two different drivers??? You'd think it was possible to check before assigning a memory range that it is not already assigned and if it is, push to a different range that isn't. And then even worse, afterwards it can give you a list of places where it failed, but not do anything about it! Is it really that hard to arrange or rearrange the memory assignments? Evidently it is, and I hope somebody here can enlighten me as to why this has to be so difficult.

Of course, I will also appreciate advice about how to sort out my memory conflict without having to reinstall everything as HP customer care suggests.

Thanks in advance!

Send me your minidump and MPS Reports. See my .sig for more details.

 

[flyvholm]

Thanks dclive! Dell, Microsoft and other companies ought to pay some of the people in this forum who are taking work off their hands. And the help I am getting here is much more useful and qualified than the generic replies I'm getting from HP customer care.

I wasn't familiar with MPS reports and minidumps, but learned about it (thanks Google!). I also read your Bluescreen Handy Guide and have followed the steps there - have installed all Windows updates (except a journal viewer that appeared irrelevant) and done all the driver updates I could find. Blue screen persists when booting in safe mode. I mailed you the MPS reports, but no minidump is created for this event (I did make sure that Windows is configured to make minidumps). Interestingly, the notebook actually managed to start up in safe mode once. I have no clue how I did things differently from the other attempts, but the bootup did not proceed as it usually does. When starting up in safe mode, it usually prints the drivers as it loads them. But this one time it didn't, and the safe mode worked. It puzzles me what I did differently. Anyway, does Windows print the driver it loads before or after it is loaded? It would be pretty lame if it is after, so in case it is before: The last driver listed before the blue screen is tiumflt.sys, driver for the PCMCIA adapter (Texas Instruments PCI-1620). Strangely, this device appears twice in the device manager. I uninstalled one of them, rebooted in safe mode but got the usual blue screen, and then when I started up in normal mode and checked the device manager again, I'm back to having two of them.
Another piece of information that might be helpful is that I'm having issues with my USB ports. They work fine for my memory card readers, but hooking up an external DVD burner, the burns fail with a 'scsi command error' message in Nero. Tested the same setup with a different laptop where it worked almost fine - burns would only fail at the highest burning speed (12x DVD). I suspect that it is the nForce3 150 chipset that is simply flawed, but don't know if the instability could be connected to a memory conflict. I have both updated that driver and rolled it back to no avail when it comes to the memory conflict causing my blue screen.

I also mailed you a 'screenshot' of the blue screen (taken with digital camera). The memory addresses involved are the same every time.

Hope you can get something out of all this info; let me know if there's anything more I could do that would be helpful. Thanks again!!!

 

[flyvholm]

For completeness I?ll report what resolved this issue. I previously reported a number of items that showed up in the ?Conflicts/Sharing? section when using the WinXP system info tool. I knew that shared IRQs are no problem with an ACPI system, but evidently shared memory ranges are common and no problem either. So the HP Customer Care representative that used this as a reason for reinstalling the OS must either have been ignorant or have a tendency to use this advice as a convenient (for THEM!) way to resolve issues.

More qualified help came from dclive to whom I sent MPS reports (click on the link in his signature to learn more about this) but no memory dump since for unknown reasons the error didn?t produce any. With no dump he couldn?t specify the driver at fault, but since it was most likely a non-MS driver, he checked the file ?filters.txt? in the MPS reports and pointed out two non-MS filters that I could try to uninstall (Nero InCD and the driver for my touchpad). I uninstalled InCD, and the blue screen was gone. It didn?t come back when updating to the newest version of the Nero software (and hence reinstalling InCD).

The issue may be resolved, but I?m not happy at all. I will not accept being a helpless end user, but here I am. The blue screens don?t make sense to me, and my intuition appears useless. Evidently, the problem had nothing to do with memory conflicts. I don?t understand how this (the BSOD) can be the most informative help Microsoft can come up with. There?s info for the experts (such as ?IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL? and 4 hex numbers) and for the helpless end user (?try rolling back drivers?), but nothing in between. What I want is some background info as to the cause of the error so I can understand what is going on and then some help to learn how to use the ?expert info?. If those blue screens pointed to some information on how to use the ?expert info? with dump files and MPS reports, a lot of people could learn how to solve issues on their own, and dclive could use his time for something better. Thanks to him for his effort.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: flyvholm
For completeness I?ll report what resolved this issue. I previously reported a number of items that showed up in the ?Conflicts/Sharing? section when using the WinXP system info tool. I knew that shared IRQs are no problem with an ACPI system, but evidently shared memory ranges are common and no problem either. So the HP Customer Care representative that used this as a reason for reinstalling the OS must either have been ignorant or have a tendency to use this advice as a convenient (for THEM!) way to resolve issues.

More qualified help came from dclive to whom I sent MPS reports (click on the link in his signature to learn more about this) but no memory dump since for unknown reasons the error didn?t produce any. With no dump he couldn?t specify the driver at fault, but since it was most likely a non-MS driver, he checked the file ?filters.txt? in the MPS reports and pointed out two non-MS filters that I could try to uninstall (Nero InCD and the driver for my touchpad). I uninstalled InCD, and the blue screen was gone. It didn?t come back when updating to the newest version of the Nero software (and hence reinstalling InCD).

The issue may be resolved, but I?m not happy at all. I will not accept being a helpless end user, but here I am. The blue screens don?t make sense to me, and my intuition appears useless. Evidently, the problem had nothing to do with memory conflicts. I don?t understand how this (the BSOD) can be the most informative help Microsoft can come up with. There?s info for the experts (such as ?IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL? and 4 hex numbers) and for the helpless end user (?try rolling back drivers?), but nothing in between. What I want is some background info as to the cause of the error so I can understand what is going on and then some help to learn how to use the ?expert info?. If those blue screens pointed to some information on how to use the ?expert info? with dump files and MPS reports, a lot of people could learn how to solve issues on their own, and dclive could use his time for something better. Thanks to him for his effort.

If you download the debugger (see the second or third post in my .sig's URL) you can hit F1 and get into help, and from there you can get a good list of what the bluescreens are and what they mean.