Laptop Occasionally Crashes/freezes On Scanning....

I have some concerns that I thought might be possible infection of my Dell laptop, running Windows 7 Home Premium (Service Pack 1); 4.00GB installed memory; 64 bit OS, but after working through some steps in the malware forum (which did not appear to turn up much of anything_....I was redirected here....

From my original post: Started having occasional system crashes when running (automatic) Avast antirvirus scans - sometimes the computer would freeze when the scan was around 97-99% complete (or just the scan would freeze, necessitating reboot to get it to stop "running" for hours upon hours with no progress), or sometimes crashing, with a "Kernal Data Inpage Error" and a message that it was "collecting data for crash dump" and twice now, that the "memory dump failed". I stopped running the daily scan to try to sort out the issue as I was afraid it would cause additional damage with the crashes, and used the Avast Boot Scan and other protection I have from MG recommendation for diagnostics, etc.

Also noticed on my (weekly) "clean-ups" that Spybot Search and Destroy also (on 1 or 2 occasions) caused the same thing to happen and decided to do the Malware reports and post, as I am now nervous that I may have become infected as a few more issues started to appear: (UPDATE: Not apparently the case).

Around the same time the crashes started, the computer stopped "hibernating", and would reboot itself minutes (half an hour sometimes?) later. (UPDATE: This no longer seems to be an issue).

I also started to see the (!) symbol remaining visible almost every day on the shut down menu, despite having ensured that automatic updates were complete (and in fact, removed the "automatic" update so that I could be sure when the prompt for updating appeared that I successfully downloaded and installed them). I rarely ever boot the computer without seeing that prompt on shut down or restart. However Avast bootscans never revealed any problems, and the computer otherwise seemed okay..... (UPDATE: Still appears).

When I ran the scans today, the Malware Bytes scan did the same thing: I noticed the scan stopped at the C:/SYSWOW64/drmmgr.dll file and then crashed to the Kernal data Inpage Error page as above. I RERAN that scan in SAFE MODE and it completed (text file attached for that scan), but not without a VERY large pause (6 minutes) at just about exactly the same point... as I held my breath for a crash, I noted it paused at C:/WINDOWS/SYSWOW64/dpx.dll - probably the file JUST before the (now becoming infamous) drmmgr file I have seen on former scans just as it crashed..... but it finally moved on and completed the scan.

Rebooting after that (and the other recommended) scans revealed the (!) symbol on the shut down menu, and to test the ability to complete an Avast scan I booted in normal mode and that scan, sadly, crashed again around the 96-97% complete point.....

UPDATED TO ADD: Another swipe at a Malware Bytes scan minutes ago had it stall, but then complete the scan, at the same folder, but different (though close in alphabetical order) file: C:/SYSWOW64/dpnsvr.exe.

I hope that is enough info to help..... Thanks so much for your assistance!

 

Let's take a look at some details, esp. on the BSODs, get the info from this tool zipped and attached, it should furnish fresh details to study. If that tool fails, try this method instead.

 

Hi satrow. Just ran the scan, and tried to upload the zipfile, but is says "The uploaded file is too large".

 

Try to breakdown the contents of that zip file into smaller ones, or remove some of the older *.dmp files - if there's a full/kernel dump in there, it'll be huge, upload that somewhere publicly accessible, like OneDrive, and add the link in a reply.

 

Separated the files and attached below..... Unfortunately I was wrong about the hibernating- left computer for around an hour and when I got home it was sitting there "wide awake" and waiting..... darn it.

 

The data collected isn't too helpful, there's still no data about the BSODs in a humanly readable format, possibly the dumps/minidumps are being removed at boot by CCleaner (please start CCleaner and use the Settings to prevent it running at Boot). I do see some potential software issues but the crash type you specified, kernel data inpage error, is almost always hardware -related.

The Usual causes are listed in order of likelihood. Memory - I'd expect you to have reported several different crash types, I don't see evidence of others either. The next four causes are all hardware, then malware (already ruled out), followed by rarer, mostly hardware issues.

It looks like the Seagate hard drive is the most likely problem. SeaTools for DOS needs to be run on this drive to test for errors, you'll need to create a bootable CD to do this, details are here, from section 2. onwards.