Well, I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is, I just have no clue how to fix it.

Background: While running BOINC, I decided to do a disc cleanup on my SSD, since I do it every so often and with SSDs it's good to not load them. I did a disk cleanup operation with BIONC running, and deleted a record 800MB of temperoary files (normally there's like 20MB, another reason that I'm lead to think it was all BOINC's), which I'm now lead to believe were probably being used by BOINC. There's no chance of getting them back either since I ran the SSD Trim function right afterward.

After that, I rebooted immediately after (BOINC not snoozed) to see why coincidentally enough one of my case fans was not working. On reboot, I got into the desktop for about ten seconds and got the BSOD mentioned in the title. I booted into safe mode, and deleted the registry entries that make BOINC start with the system start. Sometimes it would also get the 'IRQL Not Less than or Equal to' Error also.

I went into Vista the normal way, and it booted just fine. 15 minutes later, I manually started BOINC, and after about 10 seconds it gave me the same BSOD.

Now I've tried Reinstalling, uninstalling, deleting the whole data folder and reattaching projects, deleting BOINC registry entries, anything I could to get BOINC completely off my PC and have a fresh install, but after about 5 seconds of starting BOINC, it always gives the BSOD listed above.

My guess is that I deleted one of BOINC's files with disc cleanup, and then upon reboot it tried looking for that file, and can't find it so I'm getting a BSOD. But that's just my guess.

Any idea how to fix this? My PC is completely fine if I don't run BOINC but obviously I'd rather that I could run it, and being that I'm running with a Core i7 that never gets loaded I should definitely be helping.

I've got Vista x64, Core i7 920, NVIDIA GTX 275, the Newest BOINC, an OCZ 60GB SSD for the OS and BOINC is on a 1TB WD Black Drive. My Page file is on drives 2 and 3, the 1TB WD Black Drive and a 1.5TB Samsung Drive. My PC is stable while Overclocked both in Prime95 and FurMark. GPU and CPU temps never exceed 90C. At the time I was running the New NVIDIA 256 driver but I was having some trouble (not with BOINC though) with it so just a few minutes ago I went back to 197.45, and it still won't work.


Thanks!

Since you uninstalled and reinstalled BOINC, it's not a BOINC file that's missing. I'm steering more in the direction of the motherboard chipset drivers or the hard drive drivers. Have you reinstalled those yet?

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No, but why would they be missing? I do have all my drivers for everything up to date and installed correctly, plus everything else still works and BOINC worked on those same drivers for weeeks. My RAM and all my HDDs are fine.

BOINC leaves files behind for the projects. I'm thinking that after reinstall, a project tells BOINC to start said project, so BOINC looks for the temporary file since that's where it was last and can't find it. I just need to verify that's the problem and then how to fix it.

. . . But I'll be back in a minute after reinstalling the mobo drivers.

Oh and here's a video of a BSOD I got launching the program before any re-installs or anything:



After reinstalling BOINC: (I've also tried the Repair function)

Well, I just started up BOINC and it appears to be working. :)

All I did was reinstall the program a bunch of times and reinstall the SATA driver.

I'll get back here in a while if I get another BSOD.

Thanks!

I'm thinking that after reinstall, a project tells BOINC to start said project, so BOINC looks for the temporary file since that's where it was last and can't find it.

No, since you already said:

I've tried Reinstalling, uninstalling, deleting the whole data folder and reattaching projects, deleting BOINC registry entries, anything I could to get BOINC completely off my PC and have a fresh install

When you uninstall BOINC, clean out the registry entries, delete the data directory, there isn't much left of BOINC to miss anything after you reinstall it. You're starting completely clean, thus it's not BOINC. :-)

The last time I had these errors it was my motherboard that was fried though. Um, not trying to scare you, just giving an option. One of my RAM slots was broken, and the only way to see that was by starting BOINC. Without it, the system ran fine, as it wasn't using that much memory... Add BOINC and BSOD into page faults, IRQL not less, 0xC5, 0xD1, 0x0F etc. etc.

But in your case it might still be simply a missing or corrupt driver. BOINC, or more like the projects running under it, use a lot of your computer: CPU, RAM, HDD, GPU if you use that. So anything not completely correctly stable will be failing when BOINC runs. Which doesn't necessarily mean it's BOINC's fault, it just points out there's a system problem. :-)

You already ran all the things to show it isn't BOINC's fault. So now we just have to find out what is.

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I don't know what the problem was, but I do know that my PC was stable without BOINC. I tested the RAM, CPU, and GPU, and at the same time to test the PSU. I also error-scanned both HDDs.

But whatever, it works now.

P.S., I know I didn't get everything off the system since when I installed it again it still knew where I had it installed last, which was not the default location.

EDIT:

I just noticed after restoring my Data directory that LHC@home was no longer there! Perhaps that was causing the problem and now that it's gone BOINC works.
I just reattached BOINC to LHC and we'll see if we get any BSODs then.

P.S., I know I didn't get everything off the system since when I installed it again it still knew where I had it installed last, which was not the default location.

That's the registry entry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Space Sciences Laboratory, U.C. Berkeley\BOINC Setup

:-)

But I think your SATA driver reinstall will have fixed it. If not, please do return and we can check other things.

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Thanks for the help!

P.S., my PC has had lots of very odd problems happen to it in the past that have just randomly fixed themselves after a while; Vista's been quite unpredictable in my experience.

UDPATE:

Right now I'm running BOINC and as many apps as possible so I've gotten my memory usage up to 5.7GB of 6, so besides the MemTest I did, I know all the memory works right.

I experienced this problem a couple of months ago. It turned out to be a bad mememory module. It took awhile to uncover the error because I never let MemTest86 run long enough to detect the error. The test sometimes would appear in test 5 (block 64 move) or a subsequent test. It always passed tests 1-4 & 6. If it didn't fail on 5, it would fail on 7 or 8 (I forget which one). The memory address was the same regardless of which test detected the error.

That is if it failed in test 5, the same memory address would fail in test 7 (or 8). If it passed 5, it would still fail test 7 (or 8). Again, I don't remember the exact post-5 test it would fail on. Moreover, it would fail the extended test 5 (the block 512 move) at the same memory address implicated in the previous tests every time.

If all tests, i.e., test 1-9 MemTest86 completes w/out error twice, then your RAM can be confidently assessed as being sound. Trouble is those tests take forever to complete. If the RAM passed MemTest86 testing, I'd hazard a guess it had something to do with your SATA drivers. It appears that reinstalling them resolved the issue.

Based on my experience, the particular error caused a datawrite into the region on the HDD defined as being the swap file. This inherently causes the swap file to become fragmented / corrupted. I'd suggest that you delete the swap file on the drive. Then run CHKDSK /X on the drive. This should be done as a matter of course for any BSOD. Don't rely on the HDD dirty being set.

After defragging the HDD, reestablish the swap file. This is assuming that you have a fixed size swap file established and a contiguous swap file is desired for optimal performance. If you haven't configured a fixed size page file then this may not be an issue. However, you should be aware that swap file fragmentation degrades performance and hinders defragmenting of the HDD. Ideally a fixed size swap file should accomodate 95% of expected paging requirements. The remaining 5% is the minimum size for the adjunct swap file on an alternate HDD. That swap file should be allowed to grow as necessary; when no longer needed it'll shrink back to its minimum defined size. I'm not all that concerned about swap file fragmentation in the 95+% swap file useage scenario.