Spontaneous Reboot with BF2

Ok. Every once in a while while playing BF2, there will be this noise that sounds a lot like mic feedback and then my PC will reboot. It happened once tonight, once on Saturday, and three times on Friday during FNF (which prompted a complete windows reinstall on Saturday btw).

Seems to be a hardware issue, and it only has happened so far while playing BF2.

Thought it was the new VIA system drivers I had installed and rolled them back, but it still happens.

Using the event viewer I found this:

Event Type: Information
Event Source: Save Dump
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1001
Date: 2/1/2006
Time: 10:01:51 PM
User: N/A
Computer: FRANKENSTEIN
Description:
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x1000007f (0x00000008, 0x80042000, 0x00000000, 0x00000000). A dump was saved in: C:WINDOWSMinidumpMini020106-01.dmp.

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

clicking on the link gets me no more information. Anyone have any ideas as to where I can find out more info?

Is it possible to read the .dmp file somehow? What would it tell me?

Yep, they couldn't have told you less... urrg.

I did find this:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/137539/

I did do a bios update not that long ago. Could that be the culprit?

After reading that article, it occured to me that Racer had the same problem the last time we upgraded. During BFV, his system would reboot. We had identical systems. I narrowed it down to the memory. We swapped memory and sure enough, the reboot started happening on my system. He RMA'd the memory and got a different brand and the problem went away.

Have you recently upgraded your memory or mobo? Could you swap memory with Bubba to test yours?

When I had the same problem, it turned out to be a bad Power Supply, but I didn't get the dump like you are.

Atomm wrote:Have you recently upgraded your memory or mobo? Could you swap memory with Bubba to test yours?

HELLA NO!!!!

I tested the memory extensively in December. I attempted to upgrade my memory to 2 GB near Christmas only to find that my particular motherboard only supports 2 sticks of the memory I have (even though it has four slots). I didn't find this out until after I had purchased the additional memory so I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my PC wouldn't boot and was really unstable when it did boot. I did not find any issues with either the existing ram that I had or the new ram using Memtest. I may need to run that again.

Microsoft Says wrote:Double fault
A double fault occurs when an exception occurs while trying to call the handler for a prior exception. Normally, the two exceptions can be handled serially, however there are several exceptions that cannot be handled serially and in this situation the processor signals a double fault. The two primary causes for this are hardware and kernel stack overflows. Hardware problems are usually related to CPU, RAM, or bus. Kernel stack overflows are almost always caused by faulty kernel-mode drivers.

So it's either hardware (RAM I think I could RMA, but if it is CPU or MB I am f*cked), or these kernel-mode drivers. From what I can tell, kernel-mode drivers can be from any piece of hardware. Likely culprits in my case are the VIA system drivers, VIA Raid Driver, and CreativeLabs Soundblaster Drivers. Video drivers I have been using for months (ATI Catalysts 5.11s)

Anyone know of anyways to test for hardware issues on the MB or other hardware?

What mobo and chip do you have?

I don't know of anything to test off hand, but I can find out.

BTW, are you running the new ram or the old?

I am running the old ram (I returned the new stuff) but it exactly the same as the new - just a different batch.

I have an Asus A7V880 MB with a AMD Athlon XP 2400+ (not overclocked).
VIA KT880 chipset
RAM is 1GB (2 x 512) Corsair Value Select PC3200 (VS1GBKIT400) - bus speed is set to 266 to match Proc.
ATI Radeon 9600 (Catalyst 5.11 drivers)
Soundblaster Audigy 2 Value (02.08.0004 driver set)

Did this happen to start after you installed the new sound card?

I had that happen a long, long time ago. My new soundcard, Live 5.1 when it first came out was causing Baldur's Gate II to reboot upon certain sound effects.

I think so, but not 100% sure. THere is some chatter on the Soundblaster boards that sounds similar to the problems I am having. I am going to try and do a reinstall of the sound card and see if that helps.

Yeah we could always trade some RAM or sound card sometime. You said it takes a few hours to knwo though right?

If I remember right, I had to turn off the EAX in the game. Before you do all of that, try changing the sound settings to see if that helps.

Yeah Bubba. I never seems to happen immediately. It did happen 3 times last friday night in a relatively short period of time, but not immediately. The chatter on the SB boards was that it may be a certain combinations of sounds that "trigger" the crash on certain sets of drivers.

I will see what happens tonight with the reinstall of the card. I may reinstall the system drivers as well just to make sure that nothing is corrupted.

Want me to bring in my card for you?
I'll switch with you for a week or even go back to my old one.

Thanks Bubba, but I don't think you need to at this point.

Ran memtest for awhile with no errors so I re-flashed the bios, and did a clean driver install on the Audigy 2. I then played BF2 CTF for about an hour and a half with no issues. I am not convinced that the problem has gone away, but I am hopeful.

I am going to run memtest overnight just to check one last time.

I hope that did it. Rebooting in the middle of a game sucks big time.

yes it does.

I ran memtest overnight. Completed 8 cycles and most of a 9th without an error before I rebooted it this morning. BF2 ran smooth as butter last night with no hitching or sound issues 🙂

While I was messing with stuff I also optimized my bios settings using Adrian's Rojak Pot Bios Optimization Guide, which is excellent btw.

http://www.rojakpot.com/freebog.aspx

Was the crashes at the beginning of the maps?
I sometimes crash to reboot, I think it's my video card overheating.

Crashes seemed to occur randomly in the middle of maps. Since I did what I said above, I haven't had any issues. I'm thinking it was corrupted sound card drivers after all of that. I played for like 5 hours on Friday night without a reboot. The game did crash to desktop on me once, but that was it.