I removed my motherboard today to install a liquid cooling kit. I failed to label my sata cables upon motherboard removal (I have a DVD rom and 2 HDDs). Well, I finally got the computer started but now when I attempt to start FSX, the opening screen hangs for a long time before I finally get the dreaded BSOD "page fault in non-page area". Is this happenning because of my HDDs being on different SATA ports? Doesn't make sense. Even ran Memtest and that was fine. I'm clueless.

make sure you dont have DX10 checked. 

I run  XP 64-bit, no DX10

 

 

Is this happenning because of my HDDs being on different SATA ports?

 

Possibility. According to Microsoft, this error can be caused by faulty hardware, anti-virus software, a corrupted NTFS volume or a bad system service.

 

The system registry shows FSX and FSX addons installed in a certain directory and they may now be showing up on another HDD.  The BSOD can be caused by a lot of different things but I would first get rid of the page file, restart Windows and then reenable the page file.  To do this, click on the Start button, type virtual in the search box then look up in the menu and click on How to Change Virtual Memory Settings.  Once opened, enable 'no paging file'.  Now restart fsx.  Once restarted go back into virtual memory settings and change it to System Managed Size. 

 

Check your disk drives partitions and volumes and make sure their are no problems indicated.  Open up disk management.  Click on the Start button and type disk management in the Search box then look up and click on Create and Format Hard Disk Partitions.  Is the HDD that you originally had FSX installed on still the same HDD or did the system change the drive letter to something else?  Is it showing all drives are healthy?

 

Hope this helps.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Jim,

O.K. I have since been able to finally get into FSX. I got a bunch of messages telling me that all my FSDT sceneries needed to be activated (had to be because of the sata cable mix up). Now when I start I get the message about the blgmanx.dll not being good. When I choose not to run it, I get into FSX just fine. When I say that I do want to run that file, I get the BSOD with the same page fault message. So, is the BSOD caused by that blgmanx.dll file? I set my page file per NickN's XP64 tuning guide way back when with a custom size of 3072mb. I have 8gb of memory installed, do I still need to clear the paging file per your suggestion? Thanks in advance 

 

 

do I still need to clear the paging file per your suggestion? Thanks in advance

 

Yes.  The error msg you are getting indicates something in memory is there but it isn't anymore.  Since you have plenty of memory, you can easily run FSX and Windows without a page file but all you need to do now is get rid of it like I said above, restart, then reactivate it.

 

I've seen NickN's 64 bit tuning guide but FSX is a 32 bit application operating in a 64 bit environment.  So you'll be using 32 bit (x86) everything when it comes to FSX.  The only advantage of a 64 bit OS over a 32 bit OS is the fact it manages memory better.  If you had the 32 bit OS, FSX wouldn't see anything more than 2 GB's of memory and, with the /3GB switch, it would see up to 3GB's.  I'm not sure how much your XP system is using.  I know Windows 7, 64 bit can use up to 4 GB's of memory for FSX and that's it. The rest of any installed memory is used for your system operating functions.

 

I really do not like custom page file settings.  If you have problems running FSX, consider this the first place to look for fixing the problem.

 

The page fault BSOD can be caused by a multitude of problems but, since you indicated you might have changed controllers on your SATA drives, that is most likely the problem.  But, there could be other hardware problems and software problems.  Have you gone into your BIOS and made sure your boot disk is at the top and all disk drives are being properly recognized?

 

Best regards,

Jim

Jim,

Have gone into the BIOS and everything is o.k. As far as the page file is concerned, I have my o.s. on D: and FSX on C. I looked after I read your suggestion and I have no page file for C drive(where FSX lives), only one for  D drive (makes sense I guess). I'll go ahead and delete the page file, start FSX, then go back and change the page file to system managed.

Well, no dice. Windows blue screened  while warming up. What's strange is that in the BIOS under the first tab , Standard CMOS features, the SATA numbers are out of order. 0,2,1,3,4,5. The ports themselves didn't physically move, ???

I would now run a Driver Scanner and make sure all of your drivers are up-to-date, especially for the HDD's.  I use a product called Driver Scanner - http://www.uniblue.com/software/driverscanner/ periodically.  It's freeware unless you want the software to update the drivers it finds outdated.  So you can run it, see if anything is outdated and, if so, you can go to the website where the driver would be located and download it and install it.  Or, you can pay for the installation.

 

You might also clean up your registry with a freeware registry cleaner like CCleaner. 

 

Sorry, I'm running out of ideas.  It appears to be a HDD problem and I think the CCleaner will clean up some invalid entries.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Got it! Did a little more digging after copying down more info from the BSOD. Namely "disk.sys". That lead me to understand it was definitely a sata cable order problem. Apparently XP64 requires your boot device to be on the first sata port (for me, 0). So I took only the drive that my operating system is on and plugged it into each sata port. No luck, system boot failure in each port. So next I tried just the drive FSX is installed on. The message I got said that windows needed another drive along with what I had plugged in to boot. That told me that I was on the right track, so I left that drive plugged into sata 0. When I plugged my os hdd into sata 1 and booted up, I had to choose which drive I wanted to boot from. I never saw that message before so I figured the order was wrong. Same message with 0 and 2. Zero and 3 was a winner. No choice of drive at start up, straight into windows, just like before this whole mess. Of course the real test was firing up FSX. Sucess! Five straight start ups, not a hitch. Yeah!!

Glad you were able to figure it out.  I had a similar issue but my ASUS board figured out which drive had the OS and booted up.  I have Windows 7 and maybe Windows 7 has the ability to figure out the HDD order.

 

Best regards,

Jim

Yeah, I have a 256 gb Samsung pro ssd coming soon that I planned on moving fsx to for faster loading, it might also be time to format the os drive with win7