Resolved irql_not_less_or_equal BSOD on startup

Howdy folks. Back again. These random comp issues are giving me gray hair .

Edit: forgot to mention my specs are in My System under my name. win7 pro 64. I have not made any updates or changes to my computer in the last week or so. It was working fine for about 7 hours before it rebooted randomly and the BSOD's started.

So, last night i was browsing around rotten tomatoes and watching a YouTube video on my other screen, and my comp just randomly rebooted. While starting up again, I received a BSOD: irql_not_less_or_equal error after the welcome screen, which forced a reboot.

Testing to see if it was a fluke I let it run through the reboot again, and the same error occurred. Hopped on my wife's laptop and did some Googling and tried most of the solutions I could find.

1) start in safe-mode - same error occurred during boot-up.

2) attempted to boot through the windows 7 disc going through the boot prompt on my bios - ended up with a windows style background and a huge mouse clicker but nothing to click on, stayed that way for 5 minutes before i rebooted.

3) held down f8 and tried to repair - (windows has found nothing wrong)

4) held down f8 and did a system restore to a few days ago - error occurred during reboot from restore function

5) unplugged the power for 20 seconds, then boot - got past the welcome screen, got the "your system has been restored to xxxxxx date" window. after closing and moving the mouse about an inch, same BSOD and restart.

6) Ran a memory test. no errors found

-gave up for the night as it was 5am and i had to work at 10am. -

7) left off all night, came back in the morning - booted up into windows, received "system restored to xxxxxx date" window again! things seemed to be working... saw that the issue could have been from drivers being corrupted on Google so i decided to run a windows update, update downloaded (service pack 1 failed) and restarted. BSOD crash during boot.

Any help or advice would be appreciated. I've only spent a couple hours on the issue and I'm sitting at work now, so I can't do any immediate tests, but I'm running out of ideas. Wondering if I should go ahead and buy a new HD and install windows on it and boot from that and see if i can still access files from the old drive. Anyway, you guys are always a great help! I thank you in advance.

~Charles

 

also forgot to mention, somewhere between 2 and 4 i tried the "last known good config" option. same deal.

Next step i'll try when I get home is to start pulling things... memory (despite the OK memtest) vid card, blu ray drive...

 

Removed each stick and tested individually, cleaned connections, removed and reset video card. removed all non essential items (just HD connected). Checked for leaky caps, no burns visible on mobo. reset cpu.

kicking myself for not checking event viewer or a dump the one time i got in.

 

Update. when pressing f8 while booting I was given the option to Disable driver signature enforcement. This is allowing me to boot into Windows. Though if I restart it tends to hang for some reason until I hit the reset button.

updating drivers one at a time using Everest.

 

So, every time I tried to update a driver, the comp would freeze.

Decided to go to plan B) install windows on another hard drive and use that as the master and leave my old one as the slave.

working great. just getting all my old settings back now. Definitely a software issue. Leaving as open for now in case anyone has any ideas on how to go back (i would if i could, would make my life so much easier)

 

I've completed installing all my old software on the new drive, and the old one is just serving as storage. No issues anymore and I'm just going to leave it how it is, as a good reformat is always a good idea every so often. This will serve as that.

Thanks.