X201 complete freeze now and again

[urizen]

My X201 Win7/64 will occationally come to a complete freeze: the computer reacts to nothing and the screen is completly static. Turning it off by pressing the power button is the only way out. Afterwards there is nothing o indicate what went wrong in the Windows Event Log. I've had the SSD disk replaced and after that the computer will not freeze as often as before. Before the computer would not run for more than 10-15 minutes at the time, now it seems to happen every other day on average. I cannot see any connection to anything I'm doing on the computer. Now I've done yet another clean install and applied all automatic updates from Lenovo and Microsoft in an attempt to make sure that it's not a software problem.

Is there anybody else who has the same problem?

[Harryc]

Are there any red flagged events in the system log around the time of the freezes?

[urizen]

No red flags at the time of the freeze, only a critical event at the time of the reboot that the computer was not shutdown properly.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Tried imaging to a platter drive and trying the platter drive?

What about a Memory Diagnostic?

[urizen]

I've run memory diagnostics without problems and I have tried removing one memory chip at the time to no avail. I haven't tried with a platter drive although it has crossed my mind.

[IvanAndreevich]

Pretty much no software problem will cause your machine to freeze outright. Even then you should get a blue screen with details.

Run memtest.

[ThinkRob]

I second IvanAndreevich's advice: run memtest86+.

[platini]

Have you solved this problem? I am having the same problem with a platter drive. have reinstalled windows 7 two times and the problem keeps happening.

[ThinkRob]

Have you solved this problem? I am having the same problem with a platter drive. have reinstalled windows 7 two times and the problem keeps happening.

I see memtest86+ in your future...

[platini]

I ran memtest several times, the latest 2 passes, no errors.

[Harryc]

I like the platter drive/test idea as well. What happens if you run a Linux Live CD for awhile?

[ThinkRob]

I ran memtest several times, the latest 2 passes, no errors.

Ok. And just to confirm, when you say "the latest 2 passes, no errors" -- you're not implying that there were errors during the other passes, right?

If not, then I'd recommend taking a look at (in order of ease/potential benefit)

1) SMART status for your disks.
2) SMART self-test (short and conveyance).
3) Trying another OS for a while (both under load and idle.)
4) SMART self-test (long.)

That should rule out drive failures, and the use of another OS can help determine if it's a hardware or software issue.

[platini]

Yes, the last 2 and all other memtests completed without errors.
Lenovo System Test passed all the SMART tests without problems

Linux ran without problems for two days.

Lenovo already replaced the Systemboard and the problem persists.

The only thing i may think is a driver issue....

[Colonel O'Neill]

Linux on the actual SSD or a live Linux from some other media?

[ThinkRob]

Lenovo System Test passed all the SMART tests without problems

Did it actually do short, conveyance, and long tests? Or did it simply list the drive's self-reported SMART status?

(Sorry if I'm being thick -- not using Windows, I have no idea what Lenovo System Test does...)

[platini]

After starting an elimination process (swaped HDD, memory, lenovo replaced my motherboard). Yerterday my conclusion was that the only guilt might be either OS / Driver (which i resinstalres with the new HDD) or a non screened physical component.

After disabling bluetooth the system has been stable without any freeze for almost 24 hours.

So seems that either i have a bad bluetooth board or the bluetooth drivers for W7/64 are faulty.

[bdmclacken]

There is (or was) a better way of dealing with system freezes in Windows then simply updating drivers for all of the hardware or systematically disabling/enabling portions of its hardware.

You'd put a registry entry in the machine while it's working and reboot it so it took effect. Then, the next time the system hung, you'd do a special keyboard combination to cause the machine to generate a proper memory dump, the way a BSOD usually would for you. Then, you could analyze the memory dump on the next bootup, and hopefully from there, diagnose the cause, with something like Windbg.

Now, it seems like this registry option is still available in later Windows OS's-
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library ... S.85).aspx

You'd modify that registry value as indicated, then reboot. Next time your system hangs, do the Ctrl-Scroll command, and I kind of forget if the system then reboots for you or if it just silently creates the dump file and stays hung in the foreground... probably give it 2 minutes after the command and then do a reboot if it doesn't for you.

On the reboot, you should see I think a memory.dmp file on the root of C:.

I'd install windbg, and open the memory.dmp file, and then I'd run the command in the windbg tool, yes with the leading bang character-
!analyze -v

You might find it indicates which module caused your problem right from that analysis. Then yes, I'd try to do a driver update of whatever that was and hope for the best. I'd have guessed video driver in most cases.

I've done this in the past with good results, and yes it was a 'software' problem, because we were a software vendor, but we had our own driver that interacted with the network in the at the kernel level, and our driver had different types of exception error crashes, deadlocks, or loops that would result in the system hanging, the system blue screening, or the driver itself hanging in the years I worked there. We used the keyboard combination to help in cases where no memory dump was automatically created for us.

I suspect the hardest thing will be to figure out what is wrong after you get the memory.dmp file, not get the file itself. Good luck.