BSOD on large torrents

[MrEff]

I've noticed that recently I've been getting BSOD's on my larger torrents. While I haven't done any specific tests a torrent that I have running that is around 6GB will cause a BSOD or my computer to lock up when it is downloading. It will also do this when I do a re-check after I re-start my computer.

The largest torrent that I have been able to successfully do as of recently has been around the 2GB mark, just under.

When the BSOD appears it says the reason is:

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

I've checked that my drivers are up to date for my motherboard and I am running the latest version of uTorrent (1.6.1 build 490). I'm not sure of how much importance it may be but my downloads are saved to a secondary hard drive in my computer, however this has posed no problem in the past.

Any ideas as to what may be the problem?

[Ultima]

Hm... Is there any file referenced in the BSOD? Are you using any of the incompatible softwares as listed in the FAQ? What security software(s) are you using? Have you tried scanning your RAM with MemTest86+ or your hard drive with some disk checking utility, like SpinRite?

[MrEff]

There is a file referenced in the bsod, and it is NVATA.sys. I presume that this is my nvidia ATA drivers, which I thought were updated when I updated my motherboard.

As for security software I have NOD32 and Comodo firewall, which have both been working fine for a while with utorrent with no problems before this, other then setting up comodo to allow utorrent to connect.

I have run MemTest and it has found nothing wrong with my RAM, although I haven't checked my hard drive for a while and it is a couple of years old now.

[Firon]

The NVIDIA IDE drives are a bit buggy sometimes. Might want to uninstall them.

[MrEff]

OK, I'll give that a try. Just out of interest I'm using SATA drives, so should I just uninstall the ATA drivers?

[Firon]

Well, you can give it a try. It shouldn't break anything, I'd think.

[MrEff]

I think I have found the cause of the problem, and am intrigued to how it happened.

When I was having a look at the SATA controllers to see if I could rollback the drivers to the windows ones I noticed that for some reason the hard drive that had been giving me problems was set in PIO mode, as opposed to SATA1 like it should have been. How it got changed is beyond me, as I ensured that all my hard drives were set correctly when I mounted them in their current configuration.

Either way changing it back seems to have done the trick, as my computer has been downloading for a couple of hours now with no problems (usually I get a bsod after an hour or two). I was also able to re-check the large torrent successfully with no bsod.

As I said I am still mystified as to how the setting were changed, however I am happy with things (appearing) to work correctly.

[Ultima]

Ugh, that cursed PIO mode problem comes with a bunch of different symptoms... it's rarely the first thing that pops into my head when diagnosing a problem ;\

Good to hear that you *seem* to have it figured out though

[Switeck]

I've heard that hard drives 'revert' to PIO mode if windows experiences a serious crash...although it may take multiple serious crashes in a row to trigger the change. I *think* it only applies to Win XP, though it could be one of those little-known features from as far back as Win 95.