[RESOLVED] irq not less or equal

[Lord Orwell]

i have a laptop p4 2.2ghz. came with 2 sticks of 256 ram. I get bsods randomly even in safe mode. It is a "designed for xp" system but i have this issue both in xp pro and media center 2005 with sp3. I am currently full-formatting the hard drive to see if perhaps the swap file has a bad sector in it. Then i will be attempting to get win2k (sp4) to work on it.

Can anyone tell me in their experience the various causes of this error? It's always the same one.

[Nightwalker83]

This may be a stupid quest but what happens if you use 1 stick of RAM?

[Lord Orwell]

This may be a stupid quest but what happens if you use 1 stick of RAM?

no difference. I swapped in different ram sticks as test #1. test #2 was removing one stick at a time. Currently there is only one installed.

I think it may be some kind of graphics issue? I can run the entire install program for windows no problem. Confuses me why it would lock up in safe mode though, if this was the case.

[Nightwalker83]

Your ram might be faulty! Get new RAM.

[Lord Orwell]

Your ram might be faulty! Get new RAM.

i tried different ram chips. the ones i tried i pulled out of my other laptop. And i left them switched and the other one is still working fine.

[Nightwalker83]

There might be a problem with the motherboard? Did you test the RAM you took out of this laptop in your other laptop, did it work?

[Lord Orwell]

yes it did. Now here's the thing. I completely deleted xp last night off of it, did a full-surface format, and installed win2ksp4 (which the system actually came with originally even though it is a "made for xp" machine) and i have yet to have any issues ouf of it at all. I am going to leave win2k installed and try one more time to get xp to install. I think maybe there was a bad sector in the swap file. You just never know with these things.

Either that or there is a driver that is installed with xp itself that the system simply refuses to run with. I will find out the truth if it kills me.

[stanav]

It's pretty much driver issue. I've had this problem once and it was caused by a windows certified graphic driver (the Geforce FX5200 driver that came bundle with XP driver pack). I install the latest driver downloaded from manufacturer website and the problem is solved. It's funny that the certified driver wasn't causing problems when the laptop was new until a couple years later. So I guess one of the windows update could have caused it.

[Lord Orwell]

i couldn't even run windows update. Every time i tried, that was a guaranteed BSOD.

[Nightwalker83]

It seems strange that you could get Windows 2000 to work from a fresh install but not WinXP! What are your laptop's specs if there are any we need to know which you did not already say in your first post? Maybe the system isn't working with xp because you have the wrong version of driver for a particular piece of hardware?

[Lord Orwell]

it really didn't install anything. was even using generic graphics driver. I can't imagine it was anything at this point besides a drive problem because it did it in safe mode as well. Unless there was some kind of issue with the generic chipset driver. But win2k has everying working right. System is a mpc x1000 transport. Fingerprint reader, etc.

win2k will suit me just fine. I don't have a single program that will run on xp that won't also work with win2k, except a couple of "force you to upgrade" microsoft programs such as ie8 (winxp and above) and media player 11 (10 and 11 are xp or vista). And i have ff3.5 to offset that and frankly i like media player 9 better than 11 anyway..

currently having other issues with it. battery worked fine (if not for long) when i got it, and now it says it is 99% full but system instantly shuts off when i unplug it. Trying to run battery calibration now. I think it's got a loose contact or something. Can't try putting xp on it again until tomorrow after the calibration, which takes hours.

[Nightwalker83]

currently having other issues with it. battery worked fine (if not for long) when i got it, and now it says it is 99% full but system instantly shuts off when i unplug it. Trying to run battery calibration now. I think it's got a loose contact or something. Can't try putting xp on it again until tomorrow after the calibration, which takes hours.

That sounds as if the battery has had it.

[Lord Orwell]

i dont understand why it would just suddenly stop. i literally ran it in dos mode for almost an hour yesterday off of battery. then while i was carrying it it shut off and after charging it says battery at 99%, refuses to do a calibration because "battery calibration not needed", and doesnt seem to be actually accessing the voltage in the battery.

[stanav]

What version of XP did you install on that laptop? I remember that some Intel chipset was incompatible with XP SP2 and the computer would crash on boot (BSOD). If you use XP SP2, you may want to try SP1 instead.

[Lord Orwell]

my corporate disk doesn't even have sp1 on it. makes for long downloads from windows update. Starting to look like it might be video card. I installed dx 9.0c and tried running world of warcraft. It would run for a few seconds sometimes, then crash bsod page fault.
Might not even be same issue though. Currently reinstalling xp 2005 media center on it to see if it is still screwing up in xp. this one has sp3 slipstreamed.

system has a mobility radeon 9000 agp card in it. looking to see if any more crashes happen. If i keep having issues with this thing i will either send it back, or purchase a bare-bones system to install the HD, memory in.

Still confused about the battery issue. there has to be something loose in this thing. Do laptops have a relay that switches them to battery when you unplug them? This thing shuts off instantly, and it is not the first one i have had do this to me after a day or two. It actually charged when i got it last week. Now it says battery is full but won't use it. I had the same issue with an asus. I ran battery calibration and it crashed during it and that was that. never would let me rerun it and quit charging.

[Pradeep1210]

I had this problem with my PC. It was due to a faulty USP Port.
In windows 2000, it just sat in the system tray in the "safely remove devices" icon. It always showed as if some usb device is connected while in fact it was not.
But in windows XP it popped up a message every now and then informing me that one of the usb devices has malfunctioned. The windows xp never lasted for more than 5 - 6 days and used to crash with BSOD with this message - IRQL not less or equal.

The only thing I could do is forget Windows XP and continue with using Windows 2000.

[Lord Orwell]

its almost certainly video or sound related. something is crashing when windows accesses its hardware. I am sending the system back. I installed a 3d game on it and in windows xp it would instantly bsod, and in win2k it would bsod in anywhere from 5 seconds to a minute. all i can figure is perhaps xp is using more graphics memory than 2k does to start with and there is a bad memory chip on the video card.

[Black Zero]

Once I got the same problem when playing Warcraft or any program that utilizes DirectSound heavily. I disabled the Souncard and the BsoD error disappeared.

The said Soundcard is onboard one, so... I dont know what's wrong. It should be compatible with the motherboard AND the OS since it's Gigabyte product -- a well know mb vendor.

[Lord Orwell]

i suspected that as well and disabled the sound card. immediate bsod trying to disable it. I am going to check it later and see if it is actually disabled. if so, i will give it one more shot. I have a usb sound card laying around somewhere.

[Nightwalker83]

i suspected that as well and disabled the sound card. immediate bsod trying to disable it. I am going to check it later and see if it is actually disabled. if so, i will give it one more shot. I have a usb sound card laying around somewhere.

I was just going to suggest checking the sound because I remember someone here had a similar problem with a game. They disabled the sound and the game worked normally.

[Lord Orwell]

if anything it crashed even faster. i would hve already shipped it off today, except for some reason the shipping center i visited two weeks ago no longer exists. Going to a different location tomorrow.

[chris128]

First thing to do when you get a BSOD is to debug the DMP (or minidump) file that windows creates when it forces the BSOD to appear (random bit of windows trivia - its the KeBugCheckEx kernal function that halts the system and creates the BSOD). If you havent enabled Kernal Dump in the advanced system properties then I would do that first, then wait for it to BSOD again and then look in C:\Windows for a file with a DMP extension (or C:\Windows\Minidump if you dont have kernal dump enabled). You can then use WinDBG (free download from MS) to inspect the dump file and see which file it was that triggered the BSOD - its extremely likely that its a driver file. Anyway, I think the command to run in WinDBG is !analyze - if you enter that then it will provide you with the file name that it THINKS caused the error. Its not always correct but in my experience about 90% of the time it is right.

So give that a go and see what you find out

[stanav]

Good info, Chris... Never heard about WinDBG until now... Will definately try it out when I get a BSOD
Edit: tried to rep+ you but I must spread it round first

[Nightwalker83]

Good info, Chris... Never heard about WinDBG until now... Will definately try it out when I get a BSOD
Edit: tried to rep+ you but I must spread it round first

I agree! I give Chris a rep.

[chris128]

Cool thanks I thought it was fairly common knowledge lol Here's a little guide I put together for the other guys at work a while ago, just in case its of any use to you guys:

A lot of the time, if you actually see the blue screen error message then it can be fairly easy to work out what caused it, for example it may mention a specific file or give an obvious error message. Sometimes though, especially with servers, you do not get chance to see the blue screen message as it may appear at night or just randomly every few days/weeks.

In these cases (along with cases where the error message you do see on the BSOD does not give you enough information) it is usually helpful to debug the crash dump file that windows creates when it creates the blue screen of death.

For this reason, it is often a good idea to set the system's crash options to "Complete Memory Dump" or "Kernal Memory Dump" instead of "Small Memory Dump" - you can change this option by clicking the Settings button under Startup & Recovery in the Advanced tab of System Properties. Kernel Memory Dump is probably the best option as it contains all kernal mode memory at the time of the crash, where as a full dump will contain ALL objects in memory (user mode and kernel mode) so your page file must be at least the size of the amount of RAM you have, plus a couple of hundred MB. If the system has more than 2 GB of RAM then the Full dump option is disabled anyway. Also, as its only kernel mode code that can actually cause a BSOD directly then there isnt much point having user mode objects in the dump file as well in most cases.

Although you can still debug mini dumps, there will be more useful info in a kernel dump so its worth changing. Even with the Kernel dump you need to make sure the page file on your system drive is a decent size so that it can hold all of the kernal mode data that was currently in memory at the time of the crash. Provided you have the free hard drive space then just setting the page file to something like 2 GB should be more than adequate.

Anyway - no matter what kind of dump file you have, you need to download Windbg.exe from here (if its a 32 bit system anyway): http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtoo...nstallx86.Mspx
It comes as part of a debugging kit, so once youve installed it just look in Program Files\Debugging Tools x86 (or whatever its called) and then in there you should see lots of files - one being windbg.exe.

Once you've opened windbg, go to File -> Symbol File Path and then in the new box that appears copy and paste this:
SRV*c:\websymbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
This will create a folder called C:\websymbols and download any necessary symbols from the microsoft symbol server into there. (usually only about 5 or 10 MB).

Once you've done this, go to File -> Open Crash Dump and then select your crash dump. By default a full or kernal memory dump will be here: C:\Windows\MEMORY.dmp and a mini dump will be here: C:\Windows\Minidump\DATEminidump.dmp where DATE will be the date that the crash occured.

Now just sit and wait... there's no real indication that anything is happening other than occasionally seeing "BUSY" in the bottom left corner but be patient and eventually a diagnosis will appear. If you're lucky then windbg will suggest which file seems to of caused the BSOD but if not then you can type !analyze -v into the command box at the very bottom of the program to see a detailed report.
From the information on the screen you should be able to see which driver file it is that was in use just before the crash and therefore is likely to of been what caused it. You will also see the BSOD error message at the top of the output, for example: IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Hope that helps someone

[Lord Orwell]

i sent it back for a replacement.

Some of the bsods listed a filename on the bsod. It was never the same one. One i remember off the top of my head was isapnp.sys. I no longer have the item to check your info on, but since it is a comprehensive answer i am going to mark the thread as resolved.