Event ID 14 nvlddmkm, very specific BSoD, and possibly Ghosts...

[tmlhalo]

So anyone looking for a quick fix post, I'm sorry, try the next one down.

So about a year ago I rebuilt my friends Alienware because it was... on its way out. Now to keep the budget down we recycled parts from it. I also used some of my salvage from other donated parts. So here is the spec list.

 

I5 4590

Gigabyte Z97MX Gaming 5

four sticks of 2 GB 1333MHz ram (Alienware)

120 GB SSD (forgot model)

EVGA 500B 80+ bronze psu

GTX 660 Ti (Alienware, with possible Dell rebranding based on comparisons)

750GB HDD (salvage)

Windows 7 64 bit

 

So the initial build went fine until it got to installing Geforce drivers where it blue screened.  Just in case it was a coincidence I tried again, and another blue screen. So I replugged the GPU and tried once more and yet another blue screen. Fearing the card may have died, I plugged in a GTX 260 and it worked. It installed drivers and everything. So we were about to toss out the 660 Ti since the problem was isolated to it and decided to plug it into another machine. Where it installed drivers and played games fine... So we plugged it into the new machine and it worked fine... We later discovered on the next Geforce driver update it would BSoD at the end of every driver update. The driver would successfully install according to everything we could see about it. DDU plus fresh install didn't change the BSoD at the end of every driver install. The problem wasn't severe enough for him to give me the machine to dive deeper into the problem so this went on for about another 3 months.

 

His power went out one day while he was playing a game and after that we had the amazing Event ID 14 nvlddmkm error. Which would occur randomly, fresh reboot, idle, load, or gaming. It didn't matter, randomly his GPU would no longer be recognized and fps would drop to like 7. The only thing that may temporarily fix it was restarting the computer. So thinking the GPU was a false negative on being on the way out I put back in the 260. It had the same issues. So I figured something got corrupted in the power outage and reinstalled the OS. Fresh install, fresh games, and yet the same issue persisted on both GPUs. Did memtests, hard drive checks, different ram slots, different ram, checked power, tried with older drivers, tried older versions of motherboard drivers, updated BIOS, if you can think of it we've most likely tried it. It gets worse though, the sound jacks start detecting ghost devices being plugged in randomly. The Event ID 14 issue also gets progressively worse.

 

So that brings me to this week, I got my hands on the machine. First thing I notice is the 750GB C:\ drive hard drive is transferring files off at 21KB/s... The drive was under very light usage by other programs under resource monitor so this raised a red flag. I swapped drives and put a fresh install of Windows onto a 1TB salvage drive. The computer works. No BSoD on driver install, no event ID 14, no ghost detections on audio jacks***, and it runs like a champ. So I check the SMART data on the 750GB and it says it is good. I make it do a filesystem check and sector check and comes back clean. It is also baffling working at its normal 50-100MB/s speeds now...

 

You may have noticed the third part of the title, and also the fact I bolded and starred ghost detections for things plugging into audio are gone. That is because now the Windows log in noise has twice been replaced by brief disturbing very loud white noise / static. There is no rhyme or reason to the 2 instances where the login chime was static other than I think I used CCleaner during those power on instances. It has been restarted dozens of times over the last 3 days of testing it to see if the Event Id 14 error will come back yet it has only did static twice. The event generates no errors, and doesn't effect the computer in any other noticeable way. Sound works perfectly fine after the static where the windows chime would be. Since it is so early in the boot I don't think monitoring software would catch it. I want to say it is the motherboard but every component that shows signs of being dead has either returned clean or didn't change when replaced. At this point in troubleshooting it I'm assuming the computer is contacting Satan so my question is wooden stakes, silver bullet, holy water, or burned at the stake... /s For those that stuck around thanks for reading. Tomorrow I intend on testing my CCleaner theory, reinstalling the sound drivers, and continue stress testing to see if Event ID 14 is indeed gone for good since the hard drive change. If you have any other ideas to queue up for troubleshooting my new ghost friend let me know in the comments. 

-Thank you.