DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL - Discussion

Please leave any feedback about the Driver_irql_not_less_or_equal article in this thread.

A very useful article, Ian. I had this problem with one of my XP Pro systems, turned out to be the hard drive was failing. I ran the Belarc Advisor, and the SMART status was "unhealthy". I managed to get the laptop backed up to an external drive before the hard drive died, but it was under warranty and I was reimbursed the full price.

Or you could just be overclocking to far... I couldn't give it a rest, got up to 4.32GHz but beyond that an hour of 5GB LinX runs eventually always gives me one of these IRQ errors.

As you mention dump file analysis, perhaps it is worth a guide of its own? It's not as straightforward as installing a program and opening the dmp file, unless there is an easier way of doing it that I don't know about?

Good idea, a dump analysis article will be on it's way . I'm no expert at this, so I'll need to do a bit of reading up first

I'll update the article with a mention of overclocking too. I've had to drop down my Q6600 in the last month as it is no longer stable at 3.2Ghz (all of a sudden, so perhaps I need to give the system a little clean ).

I recently updated my HP Compaq c700 laptop from vista to Windows 7, suddenly one day the system crashed and when I restart it ends with DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or Bad_pool_header. I cannot boot windows from Cd (it fails) or safe mode or any other option from F8. Please guide me.

A friend of mine ran into the same issue with Windows XP on their laptop every time the laptop was put into hibernation... What they were doing was using a USB external hard drive.. they would turn it off, as it could not be safely removed as the paging file was running on it. Then they would put the laptop into hibernation by closing the lid.. Upon restarting the BSOD appeared every time.. the fix was very easy.. Use the standard power settings and make sure hibernation is enabled. Then go into the memory settings and turn off the virtual memory. Turn off the laptop and wait a minute to flush the memory. Now start the laptop and shut the lid and put it into hibernation.. Open the lid and it should run fine with or without the external USB drive attached.. Virtual memory is an archaic holdover.. if you aren't doing a lot of video rendering it is useless... and with ram so cheap, if you need it, buy some more.. Sometimes the obvious is overlooked...