Question
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Topic
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something so wrong that it made memtest86 freeze
There is something so wrong with one of my computers that it made memtest86 freeze. The motherboard is an ASRock 980DE3/U3S3 with the latest BIOS. I am running Windows 10 version 20H2.
Last night I set memtest86 to work on the computer. It was going well for 5 hours before I turned the monitor off (the monitor is a TV, connected by HDMI, that I have to turn on and off using its remote control). I left it running overnight. This morning I turned the monitor on and saw that memtest86 had been running for nearly 14 hours, which was approximately the time since I had set it going. It had done 6 passes and found 0 faults. However, when I tried to terminate memtest86, it didn’t respond to my keystrokes. It was then that I noticed that memtest86 was frozen apart from a blinking cursor. I presume that either turning on the monitor or entering a keystroke must have triggered the freeze.
The behaviour that led me to try running memtest86 is frequent blue screens, freezes, and other malfunctions, which have been going on for a few days. The first malfunction was when I woke the machine up from hibernate a few days ago and got a message telling me that the BIOS settings were corrupted and asking me if I wanted to return the settings to default, which I did.
I can’t remember the precise error messages for the blue screens, but the last one was something to do with paging (if I remember correctly) and apparently is very likely due to RAM or disk defects. When I get a blue screen, that itself freezes. The core dump progress remains at 0%. The problems continued even after sfc /scannow detected and fixed some corruption. But clearly, if memtest86 can’t run reliably, I must also have a hardware problem.
My guess is that the next step would be to re-flash the BIOS. The problem is that the machine is now so unstable that there is a not insignificant chance it would crash during the BIOS update, which I obviously don’t want to happen. Therefore re-flashing the BIOS is kind of a last resort. Are there other possible causes of the instability that I could look at first before re-flashing the BIOS?