SOLVED Blue Screens During Games

[El Diablo]

Recently within the last day or so, any game I've tried playing I've recieved a blue screen. The games I've tried playing are Batman: Arkahm Asylum GOTY Edition, Batman: Arkham City and Fallout: New Vegas, all which worked fine the day before this started.

I know ahead of time that I have keyboard drivers that aren't so great and can cause problems but I'm not getting the same blue screens I have been before. One of the blue screens didn't even make a dump file: STOP: C0000135 The program can't start because %hs is missing. Try resintalling the program. I know that none of the games are missing any files as I have verified them with Steam's verify integrity of game cache.

I'll attach the dump files for this ahead of time.

 

[Shintaro]

Mate,
Run chkdsk /r

It looks like you might have some disk problems.

 

[El Diablo]

I have this response when running this; Cannot lock current drive. Chkdsk cannot run because the volume is in use by another process.

I will schedule a check and restart and let you know what happens.

EDIT: Alright I ran chkdsk after restarting my computer and it reported no problems, no bad sectors or anything like that.

 

[El Diablo]

Here are 2 more dump files, both from Batman Arkham Asylum. I tried turning off Physx since some people said they had a problem with it and I updated my Physx driver but it didn't make a difference. Still got a blue screen within 5 minutes.

Both of these are F4 stops so this could go back the the keyboard I suppose, but when I first bought it a little over a week ago I was able to play for 3 hours with no crashes or blue screens.

I did notice that the game always seems to crash to the desktop showing an error message for a split second before causing the blue screen though.

EDIT: I added another dump file, this time from Batman: Arkham City

 

[Shintaro]

Please turn Driver Verifier on please.

- Go to Start and type in "verifier" (without the quotes) and press Enter
- Select "Create custom settings (for code developers)" and click "Next"
- Select "Select individual settings from a full list" and click "Next"
- Select everything EXCEPT FOR "Special Pool", "Force Pending I/O Requests" and "Low Resource Simulation" and click "Next"
- Select "Select driver names from a list" and click "Next"
Then select all drivers NOT provided by Microsoft and click "Next"
- Select "Finish" on the next page.

Reboot the system and wait for it to crash to the Blue Screen.
Continue to use your system normally, and if you know what causes the crash, do that repeatedly.
The objective here is to get the system to crash because Driver Verifier is stressing the drivers out.
If it doesn't crash for you, then let it run for at least 36 hours of continuous operation.

Reboot into Windows (after the crash) and turn off Driver Verifier by going back in and selecting "Delete existing settings" on the first page, then locate and zip up the memory dump file and upload it with your next post.

If you can't get into Windows because it crashes too soon, try it in Safe Mode.
If you can't get into Safe Mode, try using System Restore from your installation DVD to set the system back to the previous restore point that you created.

 

[El Diablo]

Ran Verifier, did make it past login screen but not enough time to turn off verifier. While trying to boot in safe mode it would freeze and what appeared to be artifacts started appearing across the top of the screen.

I tried to turn it off with command prompt but I'm not sure if it worked because I changed out the keyboard at the same time as an experiment and was able to login no problem.
The reason why I think verifier was still running is everything was a bit sluggish until after I deleted the settings and rebooted.

Chkdsk reran on it's own reporting no problems once again. There are three dump files, two are from verifier and the other was before I ran verifier while playing Fallout New Vegas again.
I did get about an hour of playtime in before the blue screen this time.

The crashes from verifier look like they were from Saitek drivers again so the keyboard is causing verifier the grief once again, but the blue screen from New Vegas points to memory corruption it seems.
Not sure what to make of it.

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[Shintaro]

Yes, two were from the sai driver. And one was from the disk problem.

Is there any chance of changing the KB in the future? Because it appears that all games don't like it.

 

[El Diablo]

I don't know when I'll get to replacing it, I still need to shop around for one.

I'm more worried about this disk problem though.
I know Chkdsk can't gurantee that everything is fine but what would you think is wrong with it and how could I diagnose it?

 

[Shintaro]

Mate,

You can check your Seagate Drives:
Info / Tutorials
http://www.seagate.com/support/downloads/seatools/#

ISO
http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/seatools/SeaToolsDOS223ALL.ISO

 

[El Diablo]

Alright, I ran Seatools for DOS for both short and long tests just to be effecient. Both drives passed both tests no problem.

Once again don't know what to think, especially since windows told me that it was unable to read the hard disk 2 or 3 times now after some of those blue screens.

Something else that doesn't make sense to me at least is that this hard drive problem only occurs during games and not any other time while the disk is being accessed.

 

[Shintaro]

That is very strange.
Have a look in your event viewer for problems.
So I am thinking it could be either some problem with the way the game is written, a motherboard problem, or a RAM problem.

I think that the a full memory dump *might* give better information with Driver verifier on.

 

[El Diablo]

I don't want to sound difficult or anything but if the game was written poorly, wouldn't more people complain about it? I know that New Vegas and all Bethesda games are usually prone to crashing and if it just crashed to the desktop that would be more understandable for me but blue screens seem like a more major problem.

If I give you another full dump should I run verifier with a different keyboard or by not loading the Saitek drivers for more of a chance of finding what could be the larger problem?

Also, last time you helped me out I ran Prime95 and didn't get any errors after over 24 hours of running it. I'm sure it's possible that something has changed since then, would it be a good idea to rerun it to try to rule components out or is it not conclusive enough?

I'm willing to try whatever if it will yield results.

 

[Shintaro]

Nah, never difficult mate, it's cool.

Just out of interest have you run an offline virus scan lately?

What AV are you running? Some AV messes with games.

If the drive is getting corrupted, then the only other thing that I can think of is the mobo drive interface.

 

[El Diablo]

I ran virus and malware scans a few days ago. My antivirus is Eset NOD32 AV and I also scan with Malwarebytes. Eset does have something called gamer mode whenever there is something running in fullscreen, I believe it allows more data through ports and such to prevent connection issues when playing online.

I never did get that offline Windows defender to work that you wanted me to do. Always said that it couldn't detect a windows system drive.

 

[Shintaro]

Then the full memory dump is the only possible way that we cold possibly see what is going on.

What about the event viewer? Anything there?

 

[El Diablo]

There is nothing that seems really odd in event viewer to me. It says there has been 253 errors and 11 critical in the last week, although all the critical have to do with event 41 kernel-power.

Something else is my startup repair has never worked. It's always said it can't be done on it's own becuase one of the hard drives can't be found. I'm thinking that windows has trouble recognizing drives that are in Raid setup but I'm not certain.

 

[Shintaro]

There is a F11c BIOS update. Not sure that will make a difference though.

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3908#bios

Are you monitoring the heat and voltages?
http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/hwmonitor.html

Are you using the latest RAID driver from Gigabyte?

 

[El Diablo]

It looks like my Raid controller driver was out of date so I'll update that. The BIOS I'm seeing is listed as a beta but it might be worth a try.

I watch both CPU and GPU tempuratures and loads using MSI Afterburner and Coretemp.

 

[Shintaro]

Mate,

Sounds like what you are doing is pretty solid. I suppose I'll just wait for the full memory dumps and hope that there is something there.

 

[El Diablo]

One last thing, when I get a full dump from verifier should I still load and use the saitek keyboard or should I swap it out to have a better chance of seeing more than we already know? It defiantely didn't crash as easily without this keyboard so I think we might be better off without it since we already know it's a problem.