Topic: What is this error?

[W7RE]

I got the above error just a minute ago. I was watching a DVD in Media Player Classic, and the sound suddendly got distorted. I closed MPC and opened Winamp to see if it had the sound issue as well. It didn't, so I closed it, and got the above error.

Before my recent reformat I was getting similar errors when WoW would crash, which would happen 2-3 times a night (listing a memory adress and some issue with it). I thought maybe one of my hard drives was going, so when I reformatted I swapped my C drive and D drive. I previously had WoW installed on C, so when I switched the drives I installed it to the same place, thinking that I would be getting both WoW and Windows off the possibly damaged disk.

[scottws]

I'd say it's either DEP or more likely bad memory cells.  I've seen errors like that before, but they are extremely rare.  Since they sound relatively common for you, then I think it's bad RAM.

1)  Since you think you have a possibly damaged disk, I would run chkdsk /r from a command prompt and reboot.  You'll want to do this before you go to bed or something, it takes a long time.  I doubt this is the problem, but it won't hurt anything.
2)  Download memtest86+ and burn to a CD-R, and boot to it.  Again, you'll want to do this before you go to bed because it takes forever.  But you'll truly know the condition of your RAM modules after that.

You might try also adding whatever programs are crashing (here it's winamp.exe) to the DEP exceptions and see if that helps at all.  Probably not.

[W7RE]

Well, I thougth it was my hard drive because it was giving me a memory address. Since it was only WoW that was crashing, I thought it had something to do with the area of the disk that contained the WoW data. I'm sure it's still a possibility, but that would mean both my drives have issues. They both are 3-4 years old or more, but it seems odd that they would both start having problems at the same time.

I'll start up the checkdisk thing before I go to bed tonight and see what that tells me.

[scottws]

Your error is definitely regarding an error in the memory subsystem.  "Memory" is physical RAM + virtual memory.  A memory address refers to an "address" in the memory subsystem.  It could be part of virtual memory on the hard drive, but is more likely in the physical RAM.

Areas on hard drives are referred to as "sectors," generally.

[W7RE]

I ran checkdisk last night and when I got up, my computer was back in Windows. So I guess it didn't find anything. I'll run the memory test tonight.

[scottws]

Actually, it should boot to Windows when it's done.  The results are somewhere in the Event Viewer.

Edit:  Here are the instructions on how to view the chkdsk results.

[W7RE]

So, memtest86+ told me test complete, no errors. Checkdisk looked clean too:

Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is Windows.

A disk check has been scheduled.
Windows will now check the disk.                         
Cleaning up minor inconsistencies on the drive.
Cleaning up 751 unused index entries from index $SII of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 751 unused index entries from index $SDH of file 0x9.
Cleaning up 751 unused security descriptors.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the
master file table (MFT) bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

  97675168 KB total disk space.
  73615376 KB in 76189 files.
     30536 KB in 9598 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    160472 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  23868784 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
  24418792 total allocation units on disk.
   5967196 allocation units available on disk.

Internal Info:
80 61 01 00 26 4f 01 00 73 ff 01 00 00 00 00 00  .a..&O..s.......
73 02 00 00 02 00 00 00 60 06 00 00 00 00 00 00  s.......`.......
a8 2e b8 02 00 00 00 00 a8 30 ef 5a 00 00 00 00  .........0.Z....
d6 a6 38 0e 00 00 00 00 e2 f1 09 fc 07 00 00 00  ..8.............
70 af c8 06 02 00 00 00 c0 af 55 76 0a 00 00 00  p.........Uv....
99 9e 36 00 00 00 00 00 a0 39 07 00 9d 29 01 00  ..6......9...)..
00 00 00 00 00 40 20 8d 11 00 00 00 7e 25 00 00  .....@ .....~%..

Windows has finished checking your disk.
Please wait while your computer restarts.


For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

[scottws]

Well, I guess my initial analysis was wrong.  The RAM should be fine if it passed memtest86+ with no errors.  However, it looks like there was all kinds of stuff chkdsk fixed.  Maybe the file system was the problem...

[W7RE]

Well, if that was the problem shouldn't the issue be fixed now? I did get one more error upon closing Winamp, but none since then. However the crashes are still happening. I join up with the rest of my guild for a raid in WoW tonight at about 6:10.

At 6:26 my computer restarted itself.
At 7:30, 7:50, and 8:29, WoW crashed to the desktop.



Here's the error it gives:

This application has encountered a critical error:

ERROR #132 (0x85100084) Fatal Exception
Program:   C:\World of Warcraft\WoW.exe
Exception:   0xC0000005 (ACCESS_VIOLATION) at 001B:00520ABF

The instruction at "0x00520ABF" referenced memory at "0x00000084".
The memory could not be "read".




It writes a text file for each time it crashes it seems. I'd say the file is about 400 lines long. I can post it here if you think that would help.

[scottws]

Well, I have bad news.  I Googled that error in general and also as it relates to wow.exe.

I found a shitload of stuff.  But, there seems to be no one solution that fixes the problem.  I've seen people that said they replaced the RAM and reinstalled Windows and still have the problem.  They've changed PSUs and still have the problem.  They've uninstalled various software and still had the problem.  They've called Microsoft support.  They're reinstalled drivers.  They've messed with BIOS settings.

Now, I did see some positives.  I saw a reference that said while memtest86+ is good at testing for certain kinds of memory errors, Prime95 is better at testing for others.  I saw at least one instance where someone's system passed memtest86+ full scan, but had errors during Prime95.  They replaced RAM and it seemed to fix the problem.

Someone else said that they installed updated motherboard drivers and that fixed the problem.  I saw someone mention that they improved their system's cooling infrastructure and that seemed to help.  Someone else relaxed their RAM timings.

Wow...  This sucks.  If it was me, I'd run the whole gamut of the free fix attempts.  I'd run Prime95.  I'd attempt to clean the RAM contacts.  I'd update my BIOS and motherboard drivers.  I'd get a can of air and fully clean out the inside of the case.

Beyond that... I'm not sure.  Sorry man.  It appears to be a pretty shitty problem to have.

[W7RE]

Well since my case/motherboard is a Shuttle XPS, it's got limited support, especially with it being a few years old and for obsolete hardware (DDR1, 32bit CPU, AGP video card). I've searched a few times before, and never been able to find motherboard drivers other than the ones on the CD that came with the cast/motherboard combo.

I would just say it's a wow.exe problem and deal with it, but my computer will occasionally lock up or crash while watching a DVD. Not anywhere near as often as WoW, but it happens. I just need to replace the whole thing probably.

I'll see if I can get my hands on Prime95 and see if I get any results there.

[scottws]

Well, instead of vendor-specific motherboard drivers, you could always try the generic chipset drivers (Via, Intel, AMD, ATi, nVidia, etc.).  Save a Restore Point first.

Oh, btw, handy tip:  Alt+Print Screen puts the active window in the clipboard (vs. just Print Screen which puts the entire screen on the clipboard).  Don't know why I'm mentioning it now, but there it is.  It definitely saves some cutting and pasting.

[W7RE]

Well, the board in the Shuttle is an nForce. (nForce2 I think?) I tried Nvidia's website once, and it had me go through the whole list of board series, model, manufacturer, etc. When I got to the point that I chose my Shutle XPS nForce board version, it told me to go to shuttle for my drivers. When I went to shuttle and searches for drivers, it told me the only version they had available to download were on the disc that came with the system.

[scottws]

Did you ever get anywhere with this, W7RE?

[W7RE]

Did you ever get anywhere with this, W7RE?

Nope. I just came to this thread for the checkdisk command, since I couldn't remember the paramenter to add, and realized you had posted here again. Warcraft crashes constantly. It's pretty not-fun for raiding, since sometimes it's every 5 minutes that my computer is restarting, but I deal with it.

I just ran WoW and it locked up halfway through loading into the game. I ran the repair tool in the game directory, and it told me there are too many corrupt files, and I have to reinstall the game completely. (I did notice a few days ago that one of the leaves on the trees in game is now a flat green polygon, because the texture is corrupt/missing.) So I was gonna uninstall WoW, run checkdisk, then resinstall WoW.



If my hard drive is the problem, there's a couple things I don't understand:

1- I had WoW installed on my C drive and it and my system were crashing. I reformatted and switched my C and D drives, and installed WoW on my C drive (the one that was D before the reformat). Afterwards I still got crashes. So are both hard drives dying, or is something else corrupting them?

2- If it's my hard drive, why is my VPU locking up, forcing my ATI software to reset it?



EDIT: BTW, not sure if I mentioned this before. I'm not only crashing while WoW is running. I crash while running videos from my hard drive and streaming them from the web. I've crashed while running Return to Castle Wolfenstein (hardly a graphically demanding game for this system).

[scottws]

No idea what it is man.  From the searches I did it seems like it could be anything.  I'd say the memory subsystem itself could be a problem.  CPU, motherboard, memory controller, RAM, RAM slots... who knows.

Did you ever try Prime95?

[W7RE]

Nah, I haven't tried Prime95 yet