NMI: Parity Check/ Memory Parity Error -- System crash

[killaaznstylez]

I recently purchased a Lenovo T60 notebook. I have been getting this error ever since day 1. I tried uninstalling the driver but windows keeps installing the regular ATI drivers. After searching through many forums, I finally decided to try uninstalling the regular ATI drivers and installing a third party driver for my computer. I decided to go to www.omegadrivers.net and install the drivers they had on their website. So far, its only been a few hours and i have not gotten an error, compared to getting an error about once an hour. I'm pretty sure its the notebook manufacturer's drivers that is causing the issue and I'm hoping that the third party driver will be able to solve the issue. Omegadrivers.net supports ati and geforce cards but make sure you read the faq section and how to install. Good Luck Everyone. Hopefully this fixes everyone's problems.

I am running core 2 duo 1.66, 512MB memory, ATI x1400 radeon.

[Uranium - 235]

Another person having this problem - E1705 w/ 7900 Go GS or whatnot.

Once upon a time, I used the default Dell drivers and had this problem fairly often. I switched to regular nVidia drivers and things were good.

Now my problem is that every time I run FEAR not more then 5 minutes into the actual game does this error pop up. Interesting, because I haven't really had a problem with this error for a while. The curious thing is that a game like Supreme Commander, which at one point my system noted was consuming a record-breaking 1.7 GB of RAM (ow, my pagefile!), did NOT exhibit this problem. Oblivion and Prey also did not have these problems (Oblivion did before I changed drivers).

EDIT: The 9277 drivers didn't work (I think that's what they are). GPU temperature was ~ 81 degrees Celsius before crash in FEAR. What's interesting is that on the blue crash screen it was saturated with what appeared to be dead pixels. While I was sure nothing could just 'cause' dead pixels to appear I was worried. At about two-dozen places on the blue screen were large pixels of off-colors of various types. During the reboot, those pixels persisted through the various boot screens but disappeared during the actual windows GUI rendering.

[geekydude]

I gave up. Even though the Atheros wireless card has better range, I changed back to the original Broadcom BCM4311 (Dell 1390) card. I've had no more BSODs. =)

The sporadically occurring BSODs were just too disruptive to my work.

[logume1881]

[QUOTE=Uranium - 235;1813551]
EDIT: The 9277 drivers didn't work (I think that's what they are)QUOTE]

That's odd. They work for me perfectly!

[Uranium - 235]

Well I mean, they work, just not within the realms of making the BSOD go away...

[Ryland]

I gave up. Even though the Atheros wireless card has better range, I changed back to the original Broadcom BCM4311 (Dell 1390) card. I've had no more BSODs. =)

The sporadically occurring BSODs were just too disruptive to my work.

I have found that the Atheros' card's antenna needs to be on and the laptop unused so that it attempts to "sleep". At that point I get the NMI.

[shinji257]

I just got yet another BSOD. It has been not more than 5 days since getting the laptop back. I will call them in the morning but not before formatting my drive clean tonight. I'll backup what I can.

The main kicker is this time I will be demanding a refund. They have had their chance.

Oh and in addition to this issue now my power adapter isn't being picked up most of the time. Maybe I'll skip it and go straight to unresolved issues. Do you think I should?

EDIT: One more thing here. My wireless adapter..... was disabled at the time this occured! This rules out the wireless adapter theory someone else had. At least the radio part was disabled

[shinji257]

I've decided to skip over technical support and go straight to unresolved issues explaining what the ticket was originally opened for and what has happened since then.

Here is what I told them (case 155433945)

This ticket was opened for the following error: "NMI: Memory Check / Memory Parity Error". When the initial ticket was opened I had already performed the majority of the necessary steps including running the extended diagnostics which lasted well over 3 hours and passed. I had also reinstalled the operating system. They asked me to send the system to the depot but keep the hard drive and battery. The system also stopped working the day before it left my house but the initial reason was the NMI error that I mentioned earlier in this message. Upon receipt of the computer it started up fine however I noticed that the power adapter no longer registered on the machine properly. I had to mess with the connection before it registered properly and therefore never actually charged the battery about 90% of the time. I got the NMI error within 1 week of receipt of the system which says that the error was not resolved despite replacing the mainboard. The error appeared using all Dell supplied hardware and the system is running using the hardware that originally came with it.

[geekydude]

Below is a comment from a poster on anandtech forum. (You said you disabled the wireless adapter. That's on the driver level. Doesn't stop the BIOS from interfacing with the wireless card eeprom for power management. Basically, the BSODs came from the atheros card not working well with the Dell BIOS. I bet if you remove the atheros card and put the original Dell 1390 card back in there, the BSODs will stop.)

"I can speak with relative authority since I work for a major wireless chip vendor and have been involved in problems such as you describe. The NMI you are seeing is probably the system BIOS flagging an SERR (PCIE unrecoverable error) since it doesn't recognize the PCI device ID, system ID, or subsystem or subvendor IDs when it enumerates the PCI config space. It is doing this because of the fact that it helps the laptop vendor ensure FCC compliance and minimize tech support calls from people who swap hardware like you just did. Please read my previous post for vendor that flag SERR or block against unqualified wireless adapters.

A later BIOS may disable the SERR flag but I doubt it and you won't get support from your laptop vendor either for this. There's no real way around this, and that is part of the reason why I issued my warning as I did above against doing what you just did.

Dell does not assert SERR with insertion of an unsupported wrieless card. If it blue screens, and this were the case, it would be an NMI and there would be no crash trace, as is the case with NMIs.

More than likely, if you look at the crash dump of this dell BSOD and did a stack backtrace there'd be the Atheros or some other driver sitting on or near the top of the stack. If it was an SERR assertion you wouldn't see a driver since the line would be asserted when the config space is enumerated.

I don't think people understand the complexity of PCIE cores and all the bad things that can happen with ASPM power management and all the workarounds that go into making those laptops stable. Just swapping cards and assuming they're going to work is rolling dice."

[Ryland]

Well I seem to have fixed my NMI BSOD by updating my Atheros wireless card drivers. I had been using the ones that came with the Atheros client software but when I updated to the ones from IBM/Lenovo (ending in 112d) my BSOD's went away. My laptop would get the NMI whenever the wifi antenna was on AND it was about to enter sleep mode. I have let it enter sleep mode about a dozen times in the last day and it hasn't crashed yet.

My problem definitely seems to have been a driver issue.