BSOD New Variation

I've encountered an apparent new variation of the unresponsive black screen after sleep issue. Mine started several weeks ago (late July 2012). I've reviewed hundred posts and tried dozens of fixes without success.

Problem: Sleep mode always leads to crash on awakening. However, the system also similarly crashes after idle most of the time even though sleep mode is disabled, and it sometimes crashes in a similar manner during active use.

Symptoms:

• video actually shuts down (monitor goes into the analog/digital scan when the signal disappears and then goes to sleep)--no display at all.
• Computer power light remains on (sometimes solid, sometimes flashing; flashing seems to be associated with sleep mode even though disabled--crash after idle sometimes has a flashing power light; crash during use has a solid power light).
• The fans continue to run and some device LED indicators remain on. The hard disk continues to spin but there is no access activity. Attached USB peripherals remain on and do not indicate a loss of connection.
• The computer is unresponsive to keyboard or mouse.
• It is also unresponsive to the power button. The only way to restart is to pull the power cord, wait about 30 seconds and plug it back in. (Plugging the power cord back in after less than about 30 seconds leaves the computer powered off and unresponsive.)
• The computer then powers up without pressing the power button and goes to the safe mode option screen.
• Logs indicate that the computer shut down unexpectedly, which could be from pulling the power cord. The crash doesn't leave diagnostics that I can find.
• Time to crash varies. If I restart after about 30 seconds, the computer occasionally crashes again within minutes of boot up. If the computer sits powered off for 5 or 10 minutes, it usually runs for anywhere from several hours to a day before crashing again.

Remedies tried so far:

• All hardware tests show normal.
• Temperature tests show everything within normal ranges; in fact, crashes occur when temperatures are well below limits (using SpeedFan to monitor).
• Voltages are stable (at least up until the moment of the crash).
• I've swapped the positions of the RAM modules with no effect.
• All sleep/hibernate options have been disabled, including those for individual devices. The attached Speccy file indicates that these are enabled even though the control panel shows them as disabled (could this be related to the issue?)
• The computer ran for almost 2 days in safe mode without incident (although there isn't much activity you can do in safe mode).
• The crashing occurs even when MSCONFIG is used for clean boots. The difference between safe mode and clean boot may indicate where the problem lies.
• The registry has been cleaned (no effect).
• All drivers and AMD Catalyst Control Center were updated (no effect).
• SFC returns no errors.
• Various recommended Microsoft patches have been installed (no effect).
• There are no viruses or malware.
• Disabled Norton Security Suite as a test (no effect).
• The computer is OEM OTS, with no esoteric hardware and no gaming hardware or software. Plenty of RAM and hard disk space.
• I've run so many tests and tried so many things that I'm probably leaving some out.

It's possible that in cleaning up the system, I disabled a critical process or service, although the crashes sometimes occur in the middle of activity that does not involve the system looking for services (unless some background activity is the cause).

Anyone have any insight or suggestions? Thanks.

Welcome to the w7 forums.

I hope that we can help.

That is a pretty exhaustive list of things that you have tried.

I would suggest that you remove CCC (Catalyst Control Center) it is known for causing problems.

Do you have a CAPS lock light on the keyboard? When the system crashes, can you press the CAPS lock and make the light go off and on?

If you have another machine, can you ping the crashed machine?

Let us know how you go.

Thanks. A couple of good thoughts.

Caps Lock didn't activate the LED. The keyboard has a number pad and the Num Lock LED is normally on. It remains on during sleep mode and the crash, going out only during reboot. Looks like power is still going to the keyboard during the crash but the logic doesn't work.

Pinging resulted in a message that the destination host was unreachable. My understanding is that there is no response to a ping if the computer is asleep or hibernating. If that is incorrect, the response could mean that the computer crashes going into sleep mode rather than on coming out.

Is there a file called "hiberfil.sys" in the root of C:\ ?
If there is that would mean that hibernation is still enabled. And can be turned off from a command prompt with powercfg -H off

What brand and model is your network card?
What version of driver is installed for it?

Found hiberfil.sys as a hidden system file. It looks like that file will exist whether hibernation is enabled or not. Powercfg appears to be just a command line interface for the same settings as the power options in the control panel.

Network Card: Marvell Yukon 88E8071 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet Controller
Driver: yk62x64.sys Ver 11.22.3.9. It's dated 9/28/09, which checks out as the most recent version.

No. If you run the command. Then reboot the file should be gone. If the file is Giga bytes in size then you did not not have hibernation disabled.

OK, some "interesting" results. I've attached some reports from POWERCFG.

The reports showed hibernation disabled but I went ahead and disabled it through POWERCFG. The hiberfil.sys was, indeed, a bunch of GB. The computer crashed again after using POWERCFG (could be just coincidence). When I rebooted, hiberfil.sys was gone. I suspect its existence was just an artifact of the problem, not the cause. Half an hour later, the system crashed again so that didn't fix the problem.

No minidump files are being created so it looks like either Windows doesn't see a problem before the crash (ie, crash caused by pulling the power plug on the unresponsive system or Windows getting lost in its underwear), or the crash is outside of Windows (ie, hardware-related).

The system doesn't reboot for close to a minute after the crash (fans come on but the power light remains off and unresponsive). Not clear whether this could be related to the cause or just an artifact but the time would seem to indicate either a component overheating or the need for capacitors to discharge. I couldn't find any evidence of overheating.

I added some notes to the POWERCFG reports. The setting for shutting off the monitor (10 minutes), doesn't match what shows in the control panel (never),or in the Speccy report (20 minutes). How do we get three different reports of the same setting? There are also routes to sleep mode if there is corruption and the computer is acting like it's a laptop.

The problem presents like a sleep mode error but that doesn't explain why it becomes unresponsive to keyboard, mouse, and power button.

Thanks for hanging in there on this problem.

Nothing attached???

Mate,
After so many times of "pulling the plug" have you run chkdsk /r ?
It is not the solution but your drive is having a rough time.