IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL..........BAD_POOL_HEADER

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 7:38 am

Hello there people!

I’m getting now and then an unusual error, which says:

IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

and

BAD_POOL_HEADER

The IRQ one appeared quite a few times now, the BAD_POOL only once and I know it is an equivalent of the IRQ message.

This blue screen of death appears, as far as I know, because a driver is poorly programmed, or you have a broken or defective PCI card, or the motherboard has a hardware problem, finally, it could be caused by defective ram.

I have not installed anything new so I’m quite surprised. My problem is that I cannot figure out what could be exactly. What would you do?

Perhaps uninstall all hardware trying back one at a time, which would be the method for you to find the exact problem? Cheers

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 8:27 am

Do you have a NetGear wireless network card installed on your system by any chance?

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Wed Jan 10, 2007 11:17 am

Thanks for your answer

No, I don't have such a card...

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 2:00 am

Oh well, it was worth a try. A friend of mine had that BAD_POOL error which was traced to the wireless card driver.

It does sound like a corrupt driver or driver conflict problem though. If you've not changed anything in the system recently then it could be a pain to track down.

Can you boot into safe mode? It might be worth disabling certain services (e.g. the windows indexing service which can sometimes cause problems) to see if that fixes the problem.

Another thing would be to re-install the OS (over the top of the existing one).

alfonso · Post by **alfonso** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 2:41 am

http://www.memtest86.com/

to test the ram.

Try also to disable the paging file, reboot and redo it again.

Ha, first of all uninstall cards drivers and reinstall them fresh...

pseudojazzer · Post by **pseudojazzer** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 2:59 am

I think Alfonso is probably right - could be RAM, try using a combination of sticks in different slots as well, and clearing the CMOS might be a good idea as well.

My 2 cents,
Tom

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 4:13 am

Cheers you guys for the answers

So, disable windows indexing service

Clear CMOS

(Reinstall windows, it’s impossible right now, I am working and that could be dangerous)

Test Ram (already did, it is perfect. Corsair high end ram will rarely be at blame)

Disable paging file (isn’t it the same than disabling indexing service?)

Uninstall Pulsar and the video card, its drivers, and reinstall them

Cool, will try also to swap Ram sticks into different slots

Thank you!

Will come with some answers later

Counterparts · Post by **Counterparts** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 4:50 am

Nestor wrote: Disable paging file (isn’t it the same than disabling indexing service?)

No, I'd doubt your problems are to do with the paging file.

The paging file is used to hold contents of memory which need to be swapped in and out, depending on the resource requirements of the running processes. AKA "virtual memory".

The indexing service keeps tabs of "what is where" on your hard drive, allowing for eg. faster searches.

soul-synthesis · Post by **soul-synthesis** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 4:00 pm

it's a driver issue.

I've had this in the pass. in my case It was related to my gigabit lan driver.

If i recall correctly, it's mentioned on the MS support DB - i.e. driver related.

LHong · Post by **LHong** » Thu Jan 11, 2007 4:44 pm

Agree that the symptom likes PCI Driver Issue! It seems being used the old Driver's version by accidentally its got the corrupt data from the systems.

What I would try is to remove the Scope and other PCI Hardware in the systems (one-by-one), ensure the PC can runs properly as well as isolating which causes its problems!

To solve the driver issue, you can Update driver from Device Manager by browsing the original Driver folder where the .inf is.

Do not forget to close the Scope project. Then you must reboot the PC.

Good luck,

LongStudios

Scotty · Post by **Scotty** » Sat Jan 13, 2007 3:12 pm

Two things, this the IRQ error you mention can be caused to IRQ sharing conflicts. Disabling anything in the bios that you are not using can help. Are you using serial ports, parellel ports, midi ports etc? If not, disable them in the bios and you get more IRQ ports available.

Putting the card into a different PCI slot will allow the OS to assign another IRQ number and could resolve the problem/.

On some ASUS boards you can get this error when you have several usb devices installed. the A78N-x board has this problem which was evident until several months after it was released. The solution was to reduce the number of USB devices contacted to the board.

Scott

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Sat Jan 13, 2007 5:09 pm

Good points Scotty (are you really Scottish?)

I have done, long ago, all this disabling thing you are referring to, I have disabled every possible not needed port, in fact, my setup is rather simple.

I am been able to reproduce the problem through a scanning of the PC. I mean, I can get again the blue screen through scanning with Ad-Aware, at a given point, it seems that it gets stack when the scanning arrives to one of the partitions of one of the two SATA drives... So I thing it could also be the Fast Track 376 driver.

Pulsar has behaved quite well for years, so... I don’t know. But why not, drivers can become corrupt after a while, I have read, so I will also do it, cheers.