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Windows x64 Crash and Startup Problems


unclewhimsy
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I'm having some crash and startup issues. Most recently, I've received some BSoDs for no real noticeable reason (one happened when I had two Firefox windows with Youtube open at once, another when I tried opening my Trillian contact list while playing an MMORPG). The main problem is related to startup; usually after a crash or a hard shutdown, Windows will refuse to start up and give me one of a number of varying error messages, the most common being "A disk read error occured, press CTRL-ALT-DELETE to restart." Leaving the computer shut down for a while (say, twenty minutes) will usually allow me to start back up with no error.

I know the details are somewhat sparse, but I'm just wondering if anyone has any ideas. Does this sound like I need a reformat, a new hard drive, or something else?

I'm running Windows XP 64-bit edition. Thanks in advance.

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BSoD's are usually errors caused by hardware or memory problems.

Is there an error event code or anything on the BSoD that could teach us a little bit more about it?

The most recent one said "A process or thread crucial to system operation has unexpectedly exited or been terminated." Further down I saw this string of characters (not sure if it's relevant or not)

STOP: 0x000000F4 (0x00000000000000003, 0xFFFFFADF3794C410, 0xFFFFFADF3794C678, 0xFFFFF800013C10E0)

None of these crashes seem to generate a file in the Minidump folder.

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Was there at all a line that said:

The problem seems to have been caused by the following file: .....

(with some more stuff here)

I think the error reports are only temporarily saved to your computer, until the error report is sent then they delete themselves.

If you click on the "details" link on the error report, it will present a a few directories where the files included that get sent: if you are wanting to try analyzing them, locate these files in windows explorer and copy the .mdmp or .dmp files to your desktop - that way, you've made a second copy which doesn't get deleted.

But to view these files, you have to enable viewing of hidden files and folders and/or "hide protected system files" then you can open them and see a little bit more.

One thing you could try doing is reading through the event viewer and finding any problem that could be recorded there. If you don't know how to do this, I'll post a help article I've found at the bottom of this post to try and help you a bit more.

Here's that event viewer article:

Using Event Viewer

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