XP goes to sleep after an hour or so...

[Mini-Me]

Hi there.

My media-player box is starting to do odd things it never did before.

The most annoying, is that if you leave the machine for about an hour or two, the desktop vanishes.

You can move the mouse pointer, but you cannot CTRL-ALT-DEL the task window, and no amount of mouse pressing or keyboard tinkering will give me back the desktop.

You cannot access the START menu, or the taskbar.

The screen is completely blank, except for the mouse pointer...

The only way I have been able to fix this, is to force a cold-boot by pressing the RESET button on the front of the box.

This is very reminicent of Windows Me, which was extremly good at locking up if left to it's own devices for a little bit.

Currently, it is XP Pro, with SP1a, but I will copy across SP2 and install that, plus I will run a malware check, but if anyone knows anything else, or knows what is going on here, please do comment...

Thanks.

[Sylvander]

"if you leave the machine for about an hour or two"
What are your power-saving configuration settings? [see image below]

"no amount of mouse pressing or keyboard tinkering will give me back the desktop"
The answer would be to use "Ctrl+Alt+Del" to bring up the window and use that to restart "Explorer.exe", but that doesn't work. :(

[Mini-Me]

Hi.

No, all the power-saving features are disabled.

I was watching a movie last night, and the machine crashed in the middle of the movie.

A BSOD popped up - fortunately, I had already disabled the AUTOMATICALLY RESTART "Feature".

The BSOD reported that "KERNEL_INPAGE_ERROR" has occurred.

To me, this sounds like either the CPU is dieing, or the RAM is dieing.

Page faults(if this is indeed what is going on) could be due to bad RAM, CPU or HDD.

There are 4 HDD's in the machine, all have SMART enabled(since yesterday), so I can get warnings from the OS, if they are dieing...

They always report that: "SMART enabled and status OK." during boot, or during any random test with Everest Home.

I have checked all the cooling fans, but the case is one of those iCute cases with a 25cm side-panel fan, and 120mm front fan blowing onto the HDD array, so the components should be very well ventilated!!!

CPU fan is spinning freely, and it's heatsink is not clogged with dust.

Anything else I should try?

[Sylvander]

Troubleshooting "Stop 0x00000077" or "KERNEL_STACK_INPAGE_ERROR" (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315266).

Five possible causes listed there [2 the same]:

1. Lack of nonpaged pool resources.

2. Bad blocks on the hard disk.

3. Bad cabling, non-termination, or the controller is not able to obtain access to the hard disk.

4. Bad blocks on the hard disk.

5. Improper termination or defective cabling of SCSI-based devices, or two devices attempting to use the same IRQ.

[Mini-Me]

Cheers - reading the link now...

As an experiment, I left the box running overnight last night, with nothing but the desktop, no screensavers, no power saving, and it was still going this morning...

The crashes seem to happen only when Zoom Player media player software is running, but it has been flawless for the last year or so...

I'll keep you posted on any developments.

[Mini-Me]

OK, last night, in the middle of Finding Nemo, this error happened again.
This time, I was ready for it, and made careful mental notes, plus, I took a photo of the BSOD - perhaps this will help someone who knows more about BSOD then I...

http://img457.imageshack.us/img457/818/1004846qb3.jpg

The video is playing just fine, then for no apparent reason, it freezes, and the audio is mute, for about 4-5 seconds, then the screen goes totally black for about another 3 seconds, then you hear the distinctive sound of the HDD's auto-parking their read/write heads, and spinning down. Once this has happened, at that point, you get the BSOD as above.

I have downloaded disk diagnostic software for my drives(Seagate), and will run the intensive scan on all drives.

Would it be worth while replacing the IDE cables?
Perhaps one of them has become a little intermittant - that would certainly cause data errors...
:rolleyes:

[Jiggy]

Have a look at theses - Stop 0x0000007A (http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/Windows_XP_Blue_Screen_of_Death_STOP_Codes-t43519.html) and Link (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/130801/en-us).

[Mini-Me]

Cheers. Also, when I plugged in the CD-ROM to boot up the Seagate diagnostic program, the system reported that it could no longer see a primary master drive, a 250GB Seagate...
:eek:

So, I replaced the IDE cable to that drive and it's slave 320GB Seagate, and restarted, and it sees it now...

I think this might be a bad IDE lead problem - perhaps.
Anyway, lead replaced, I am now running the long test on the 250GB drive...

Jiggy: Thanks for the links. :)
As you and others here have hinted via links and comments, it is certainly possible, that the IDE lead was/is crook. If the full-scan test returns no problems, I will leave the new IDE lead in there, and hiff the old one out and see what happens - I guess the error will re-appear if it was not the IDE lead causing the problem...

[Sylvander]

Sounds like success to me. :D :cool:

Time will tell.:)

[Mini-Me]

OK, results of test were that the physical scan revealed no problems at all, however, the filesystem scan resulted in "Fatal filesystem index errors!"

Re-booted, and ran disk-scan via EXPLORER/DRIVE/PROPERTIES/TOOLS and selected AUTOMATICALLY FIX FILESYSTEM ERRORS, followed by a reboot, and the system did a 3-phase scan, and found and fixed a couple of errors.

I cannot say what it actually found, as it listed the data, then re-booted within about 2 seconds, but I did see that it displayed the word "Fixed." at one point...

Everything seems to be running OK so far, and I left the new IDE lead in there, and have binned the old lead.

I'll post back, if this error happens again - should not be long, as I use the mediaplayer box for all my video playback...

[Sylvander]

Do your partitions use NTFS or FAT systems?

I routinely scan the FAT32 file systems on my partitions using "Microsoft Scandisk" on the "Emergency Boot CD".
I'm told it is far from being the best of programs, but I like the way it does it's job in the EBCD.
It regularly reports and fixes file problems on my HDD.

It has presently reported some "Invalid Long Filenames" that it cannot fix and I'm attempting to figure out how that could be done.

When I run "DiskEdit" on the EBCD and go to a partition...
It scans the partition before doing anything else, and reports the LFN errors and if I click "Goto" it jumps to the location of the faulty entries on the partition.
Unfortunately I don't know how to use it to fix the problems. :(

You could take a look at your own file systems and drive contents with these, just out of interest.

[Mini-Me]

All partitions(including the 4GB System partition) are all NTFS.

I have been running the box, playing video now for more then 12 hours continuously, and it has not thrown the BSOD at me - yet.

Therefore, I think we can assume, that the old IDE lead was not quite making good contact, causing the errors...

I'll post back here, if I have anything else to report, but for the moment, I think the problem has been solved.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to comment - it helped me narrow down the list of problem areas...
:)