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I'm getting frequent Blue Screens (every hour or two), with a STOP 0xF4 code. The really fun thing about these is that no crash dump is ever generated. As shown in the screen shot below, it says that it is initializing the disk for crash dump, but nothing ever happens (this blue screen was on all night).

"Screen shot"

On the first blue screen that I saw (which I didn't pay much attention to, as I assumed it was a one-off), I believe that it listed ntfs.sys as the problematic file - I can't remember what the STOP code was. There was no dump generated.

I've run a Windows Memory Diagnostic (Standard, 2 passes) and no errors were found. I've also run a chkdisk on my main Windows hard drive (SSD), with no errors found. I haven't had a chance to run chkdisk on my other drives yet...

These blue screens all started yesterday, and I haven't changed any hardware recently. I don't believe anyone has installed any software around that time frame (at least, none showing up in Add/Remove programs).

What should my next steps be? Any ideas about the cause?

System Information

Please see system information summary <link removed>

Bounty

I can't officially add a bounty for another couple of days, but I fully intend to add one for the maximum amount allowable by my rep. If anyone is able to lead me to a solution, I'll make sure you get the bounty once I'm allowed to add it.

Update

A friend pointed me toward the likely culprit: My Crucial m4 SSD, which has known BSOD issues after 5000 hours of use. I'm going to update the firmware tonight and report back tomorrow.

Update 2

This has been resolved (see my answer below). I cannot accept my answer for another 20 hours.

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  • Related: superuser.com/questions/28448/…
    – Gnoupi
    Aug 8, 2012 at 13:15
  • @Gnoupi, I'm not sure that question is related, since it's specifically about how to debug crash dumps. In my case, there are no crash dumps.
    – Eric
    Aug 8, 2012 at 13:21
  • My next steps are going to be to run memtest86+ (multiple passes), update the firmware in my Crucial m4 SSD, and take a look at the tool @wullxz mentioned. I will update the question with more information once I am able to do those things (after work).
    – Eric
    Aug 8, 2012 at 17:09
  • It sounds like you don't have all the information come back when you do.
    – Ramhound
    Aug 9, 2012 at 14:38

2 Answers 2

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The Crucial m4 SSD has a known BSOD issue after about 5000 hours of use. I updated the firmware, and my blue screen issue was resolved.

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  • Thank you for that, I spend a day trying to figure it out. I might also add that I had different BSOD errors, but they were all caused by this.
    – iddqd
    Jun 2, 2014 at 11:50
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Maybe generating Memory Dumps is deactivated. Check if you can enable it: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/235496/en-us

BSOD 0xF4 occurs when a critical process is killed. It is important to know which process got killed in order to solve that problem. I suggest enabling crash dumps and analyzing it. Have a look in your eventlog, too. Maybe you can find some useful information there. BSODs are generally logged as "System error".

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  • Thanks for the link. I'm 99.9% sure that memory dumps are enabled (I have a dump from an unrelated blue screen from 2 weeks ago), but I'll double check that when I get home. And I'll check the event log as well.
    – Eric
    Aug 8, 2012 at 15:12
  • If crash dumps are enabled but there's none it could be that you restarted your system too early and didn't wait for the crash dump collect to finish or the drive or something related to the harddrive is bad and the crash dump couldn't be written.
    – wullxz
    Aug 8, 2012 at 15:16
  • The BSOD was up all night with no dump. The hard drive thing sounds like a possibility, but chkdisk didn't find anything wrong. Is there a better hard drive test I could do that you know of?
    – Eric
    Aug 8, 2012 at 15:20
  • I don't have a SSD drive and therefore I've never tried any tool to check a SSD but this looks like what you need.
    – wullxz
    Aug 8, 2012 at 15:33
  • I'll try that out.
    – Eric
    Aug 8, 2012 at 15:38

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