Opinions on cause of Bad Pool Header BSOD

BKtje

Basically im looking for your opinion on what could be causing this.

I was at a Lan over the weekend where there were a series of power outages after which my pc failed to boot (hung on keyboard initilisation).

I finally narrowed down the problem to a faulty ram dimm and after removing it the pc would cold boot normally. It would however still hang on a warm boot.
I reflashed the Bios and it then booted normally from both cold and warm.

Ever since however i have been getting random bsod's stating Bad Pool Header(had before BIOS flash too). After a little googling i figured that there could be 3 causes: cpu overheating, corrupted/damaged hdd or dodgy memory.

Seeing as i have already removed one faulty dimm, i assumed that the other one is also damaged. To test it (dont have a floppy drive atm to do a memtest) i decided to do some memory heavy apps (Cod2 and WoW) and didnt have any problems after 4+hrs. Infact i didnt get it at all yesterday.
Would it be fairly safe to rule out the memory dimm (i know its hard to say without a memtest but as a guess)?

The Cpu (according to Bios) is at a steady 10-12C (which is pretty high for my vapo) which is well within acceptable limits.

This leaves me to hdd corruption but it just seems to random for that(that said, i do *think* every bsod has occured while surfing the web but cant confirm yet) to be a real possibility.

Is there any other cause i may have missed? Any help/opinions/advice would be highly appreciated.

8T8

Try the memtest+ bootable CD image or USB stick and see what it comes up with to resolve that item as a possible source of the problems.

BKtje

ah didn't know that it was possible to run it froma bootable cd image. Will get on that right away.
Cheers!

BKtje

Well it passed 5 passes without any errors.

Tom Dunne

Don't know how much it would help, but I continually got BSOD via a Bad Pool Header on a Dell Laptop. It only occurred when I plugged in a Netgear USB Wifi adapter.

I had some crack trying to uninstall the driver (had to use regedit to pull anything remotely to do with Netgear), but eventually after re-installing the latest driver, the problem went away.

Does this ring any bells?

8T8

Yeah do want Tom suggests and update the system drivers were possible also have a look at the event log under control panel\administrative tools\event viewer and see if anything is flagged around the time it crahses.

BKtje

no new hardware has been put in anytime in the last 6 months.

Nothing in the event viewer which matches the times, checked that before
What i may do is re-format my windows drive and see if the windows install possibly got corrupted. Will keep an eye on the event viewer in any case the next time it happens.

It does appear to be totally random. Can happen twice in a row, then not again for over a day (which is the case since my last one).

Cheers for the advice/help. Tis appreciated.

SouperComputer

download and run speedfan. It has a handy SMART anaysis thingimagig on it that you can use to help you decode SMART HD messages.

Have you tried booting from the setup CD running chkdsk? Worth a try although it sounds more like a hardware issue.

Also, did you try the suspect DIMM in another motherboard? Perhaps its the memory controller that is now on the way out?

BKtje

ill download smartfna and see what it says.

The memory controller is on the cpu in amd64's aint it?
One thing i have noticed is that it only seems to blue screen while using firefox. Could be a coincidence of course.

8T8

Some Googling shows that it is usually a corrupt/bad driver or rouge program that might be the cause you never know what might have happened when you had the bad DIMM still in the system you could always run the sfc to check the WinXP system files are okay and reinstall all the drivers for the hardware.

Then again it might be easier to just format the system and be done with it.

By the way if you want to check the health of a HD via SMART there is another good tool here if the lights are all green your fine if one is red time to replace the HD.

BKtje

im thinking ill format during the weekend if this firefox re-install doesnt work
(deffo only happens when im using firefox now).

Cheers for proggie

Edit: all lights green. Never knew you could get the temp of the hdd's

TheHairyFairy

I had this same problem about 4 weeks ago. I tried the whole ememory thing as well without luck. It expired that my gfx card drivers had become corrupted. This was even after a fresh install. I downloaded fresh drivers and havent had the problem since.

Fairy

BKtje

hmmm. Thanks for the input fairy but i dont think thats the cause here as i never have any problems while running games(ie the most gfx card intense apps).

I've re-installed firefox now and if this doesnt fix it ill do a re-format and see.

byte

I've had this problem many times with XP, it's the only cause of BSOD I get. That said, I haven't had this problem in about a month or 2.

I was of the belief it was a driver issue. Though now you mention Firefox, it was always running when I BSOD'd also, as it is seldom closed. Maybe recent firefox updates have stopped my BSODs (or plugin updates), not sure.