0xa Blue Screen Mystery

[Doug]

Everyone loves a mystery, right? This one's getting a little tired though.
Just bought new MB/case/memory, trying to get a more stable system, but
after a week of fiddling, I am frequently getting a
"STOP 0x0000000A IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" blue screen on startup. At first I
thought it was caused by improper CPU settings (that's another story), but
after setting all CPU and memory settings at very slow speeds, the problem
persists. MS knowledge base has articles with long lists of possible causes,
but due to the sporadic nature of the problem, I'd almost have to buy a new
machine to address all the possibilities. But I just did buy a new machine
;-(

Any advice would be greatly appreciated - I am in way over my head here.

Clues:
-- Address was 8042de0, device (or "driver") named is " ntoskrnl.exe "
Knowledge base article says that this suggests the named driver is
"buggy" -- unfortunately the named "driver" sounds to me more like a central
part of the OS.
-- The blue screen will often (but not always) remain after repeated
reboots, unless I remove the MB battery for several minutes. This seems to
fix it every time (so far). Other attempts at a remedy - removing all cards,
second HD and CD rom, disabling stuff in bios, sometimes would fix it, but
that, in retrospect, may have just been a coincidence. I would think that I
had everything "fixed," then next morning another blue screen would greet
me...

Faulty memory is listed as one possible cause. I got one gig of it - don't
know if win2k has trouble with that much ram.

This installation of win2k was transplanted from my old machine, which I
understand can cause problems. I could do a fresh install -- reluctantly,
because it's got a lot of stuff -- but am a little skeptical that a registry
problem could cause such a strange intermittent problem which is cured by
removing the battery. Seems more like hardware. But me, I know nothing.

Thanks in advance for any hints....
Doug

 

[Joseph Conway [MSFT]]

We would really want a memory.dmp to determine root cause here. Sounds like
it is a hardware setting but for a STOP 0xA that would be a rarity. A's are
almost always a driver of some sort.

 

[Doug]

Thanks Joseph. On a hunch, I went into the registry last nite and searched
for "highpoint" and "via". These two words are the main reason that I dumped
my last machine - the Via kt133 chipset and the Highpoint raid, both of
which, from what I hear, are troublesome if not downright defective. I found
mentions of both (since this setup was transferred from the old machine),
and tried to remove them, as well as any referenced files still on the
machine. I've booted successfully three times since then (whoopee!), so that
may have helped. The problem sometimes seems to be triggered when I plug in
more than two ide devices, so perhaps the old Via ide drivers were trying to
load.

There were several keys that could not be deleted, though. Does this mean
that they were in use? I don't know if such registry keys are even a problem
if the hardware is no longer present.

For the memory dump, I'm assuming you mean the small dump?

Thanks again...
Doug