BSOD "Page_fault..." on Vista

[Planefreak]

I have this really annoying problem. One of my friends told me that their computer was bluescreening, so I offered to take a look, pro bono, of course.

The computer is a 2.5 year old Gateway GT5654. It has an Athlon 64 x2 5000+ processor, 3 gb ram (2 x 1gb + 2 x 512 mb), and Geforce 6150SE int. graphics card. The hard drive is a hitachi 400gb drive. It runs on Vista Home Premium 32bit.

Here's what the computer does: As soon as it has been turned it begins booting like normal. When the loading bar for Vista finishes, the computer bluescreens.

"Page_fault_in_nonpaged_area"

Trouble codes:
0x00000050 (0xEC5B7672, 0X00000000, 0x86B07510, 0x00000002)

I tried all the usual things. I ran check disk on the hard drive with some strange results. I ran it a couple times, once from command prompt, and once from another pc. They both hung up at the same place for a few minutes then continued as usual. Each time it said bad sectors were recovered.

Not thinking it had much to do with it I ran memtest on each stick of ram, then put in a spare drive and was able to boot with it.

I know that it is either the hard drive or the OS but I can't figure out what is causing it. I know this computer has history with viruses and I've heard of viruses causing this problem.

Any thoughts? Ideas? or Tricks? I'm at my wits end here...

Thanks in advance, Travis

[glc]

Download and run the Hitachi Drive Fitness Test.

[Planefreak]

Will do and post results soon. Just remembered something... when I try to boot in safe mode I get the same result and the last thing that it attempts to load is "crcdisk.sys".

[glc]

If I had to place a bet, I'd bet that the DFT is going to come up with issues.

[Planefreak]

Well, I just finished. It found some problems that it was able to repair. Nothing out of the ordinary. I tried booting and came up with the same exact error as before. Just to be sure, I went ahead and tried to repair with vista disc but as before, it said that it could not fix it.

What next?

[glc]

Save files, nuke and pave.

[Planefreak]

I was worried that you were going to say that, and I thought that it was going to end up that way. What do you think happened? Virus took out something critical?

[glc]

Maybe. However, I think it's more likely the bad sectors on the hard drive contained something critical. Even though the diags say they "fixed" them, once they start they will only spread. You can reformat and reload, and it will probably work - for a while.

I'd recommend you replace the hard drive.

[Planefreak]

That's what I was thinking. First thing I did was copy the media from the drive because I was worried about that being the case. Thanks for all your help!