XP Blue Screen of Death

I keep coming back to the XP blue screen of death. I just reformated, so if this is driver related I'm going to have a hard time figuring it out.

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Technical Information:

*** STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000400, 0x00000002, 0x00000000, 0xF78868F9)

*** NDIS.sys - Address F78868f9 base at F786D000, Datestamp 3f7e7ca0

Beginning dump of physical memory
physical memory dump complete

This seems to happen while I am away from the computer for a while. It is the third time it has happened, and I'm not sure what is wrong.

Here's what I have: Radeon 9800 XT, 200 gig maxtor hd, 3 512 crucial memory sticks, A7V8X-X MB, 2500 Barton CPU.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

got something to do with NIC i guess,

have you tried disabling it yet to see if that's your culprit?
edit: or did you installed newer drivers for it lately?

 

Don't know if this means anything but I had the same problum awhile back, and it started happening right after I downloaded and installed Panda anti virus, after I did in fact unload it and cleaned all referance to it. my system worked fine

 

If this machine is on a network please describe the configuration.

What kind of internet connection do you have? If Cable or DSL is it connected to the onboard LAN port or USB?

What antivirus are you running?

 

What is NIC?

 

I have Cable, through a linksys router. There is an onboard LAN port, but it is disabled. I have a PCI card that I use to get in the internet

 

Network Interface Card, the card you use to get connected to the internet
have you recently installed new drivers for it?

 

I reformatted, and windows detected the drivers

 

have you got the original on a cd from the NIC's manufacturer?
if you do, try those

greets

 

It is a Netgear FA311 Fast Ethernet adaptor. I went to the website and couldn't find drivers for XP. Their site says they come with XP.

 

and i assume your up to date with windows updates

but i also came across this:
http://www.jsiinc.com/SUBM/tip6000/rh6045.htm

 

Thanks, I'll try the stuff on that page. I know it is not the ram. I have had the computer for a while, and the error didn't start till I formated yesturday.

Yes, I have all the windows updates.

 

hmmm, i'm getting at the end of my latin (at least it's a dutch saying)

but errrm.. what anti virus are you running?


/me wonders where the real Geeks are

 

Norton Anti Virus 2004

 

Only time I have seen that problem was with my ATI card. it is a driver incompatibilty problem and only was solved when ATI fixed it in the drivers. Since you have stated that your nic manufacturer does not have XP drivers you are out of luck there. You could try removing the pci card and using the onboard lan instead.

 

Their website says the NIC drives they have work with XP, but Netgear hasn't updated them in forever. Is anyone else having problems with Netgear?

Also, I uninstalled and reinstalled the drivers. I'll see if that helps. How did you guys figure it is my NIC?

 

ndis.sys is a networking protocol driver.

It might not be the NIC driver at all, some people have reported this exact problem has been caused by Norton AV.

 

Hmmm... Interestingly enough, I had a very similar problem when I first install Windows XP a couple of years ago and still had Norton AV on my machine!

Peace,
Gina

 

Specifically, NDIS (whichstands for Network Driver Interface Specification) allows Windows to dynamically bind network protocols to an interface. In English, that means you can have one Ethernet card that has TCP/IP, NetBIOS, IPX/SPX, etc. all installed.

Before the advent of NDIS, you would need one network card for every protocol you wanted to use. Back in the day, when a network card was a full-length ISA card, that generally meant you'd need one card for IPX/SPX -- for your Novell server -- and one for NetBIOS -- for shared DOS/Windows devices. (This was long before the Internet made it's way to the LAN scene.) This was way back in the days of Thin/ThickNet, token rings, and BNC bus LANs. ** shudder **

It's not such an issue now that everything uses TCP/IP (WinXP even encapsulates NetBIOS frames in TCP/IP packets -- that's why it has trouble talking to Win2k and Win9x), but all protocols are now attached to the NDIS subsystem that then hooks into the network card.

Here's the official MS information about your specific error:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/ddtools/hh/ddtools/bcintro_3dkj.asp

Basically, the driver is trying to access memory that it doesn't have the right to use (or that's what Windows thinks is the case).

I would still suspect bad drivers before blaming the AV scanner. You just reinstalled, so I would make sure that you're using the most up-to-date chipset drivers. It may be that Windows is miscommunicating with the PCI bus or the memory control hub in some way.

Additionally, I would download and install Everest, and determine what it claims the NIC actually is. Oftentimes, Windows is able to install drivers for a different NIC and have it work just fine (they often use the same chips on the LAN adapters). So Windows might think you have a Netgear FA311 Fast Ethernet card, but it might actually be something else. And sometimes, devices with the same chips and different manufacturers vary just enough to cause crashes. (Or maybe you're looking at the box and reading it... I don't know. )

The next thing you can do is download and run MemTest86+ overnight to ensure that the RAM actually isn't damaged or incompatible.


Oh, and if you're overclocking, don't. These are the kinds of errors you'll see when overclocking causes system instability (generally, single-bit errors caused by reading/writing the memory sticks or the PCI bus before they're physically ready).