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Boot problem with X-Fi

L

Lomic

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 27, 2004
Messages
185
I recently upgraded from my ancient SB Live Value to an X-Fi. First time I booted up nothing seemed amiss - I had uninstalled my old drivers before installing the X-Fi, and the new drivers installed just fine.

The next morning I turned on my computer and it seemed to have... died. It got past POST then apparently failed to even bring up the XP Logo. I uninstalled the card, reset the BIOS and the computer started normally. I did some reading around about X-Fi issues, but I'm not using an NF4 board, so I didn't see what the problem could be.

I put the card back in and the same thing happened, only I noticed I could see a VERY soft image of the XP Logo screen appear, so I let it sit there. After about 30 seconds I was amazed that windows continued loading, and everything in the system is seemingly stable and happy.

A 30 second pause before booting seems quite strange - any suggestions? There are no conflicts abound - and like I said once XP is started everything is solid as a rock. Specs:

Athlon64 3000+ @ 240 FSB
Termalright XP-90 w/panaflo
MSI Neo2 Platinum NForce3
2x512 Patriot PC3200 2-2-2 @ 2.5-5-8-5
eVGA GeForce 6800 "SE" w/Ultra BIOS @ 400/1080
Antec Tru430 PSU
and Creative X-Fi ExtreMusic
 
If you PC booted completely and woks with the sound card, then I'd go as far as to say your sound card is only a coincidental item.

It's likely your Antec (IE: CRAP, just like mine) power supply is dying, or if not the power supply itself, the connector. If you have been getting weird errors or freezes, or have seen a 'Windows has replaced a corrupt registry file with ...blah blah blah" warning dialoge box, it's a sign of data corruption.

Mine started doing the same thing a log time ago, I found the problem was the power connector to the motherboard had some tarnished/high resistance connections from the system board/cpu drawing more power than it was capable of handling through the cheesy connectors. I cleaned the connectors and it's been working fine for a few months but it's starting to do it again. I fresh connector cleaning and reinstall of the OS image I made fixes it for a while. My first sign was instability with overclocking, eventually having to go back down to stock clocks. Went from 2.5GHz on my XP3200+ down to the stock 2.2Ghz and still has issues.

I would recommend at least pulling the power supply connector and seeing if there is a discoloration on some of the connector pins.
 
You might have a problem with the X-fi being on the same IRQ as your HD controller. I had this problem with my EMU0404 being on the same IRQ as my SATA controller. I got all kinds of weird crashes and lockups, freezes on boot.

Switched around slots and now everything works like a charm.
 
Thanks for the suggestions. I found it odd that removing the card the resetting my BIOS fixed the problem, so I took the BIOS settings to task and went through one at a time.

Apparently after removing the old SB Live I can no longer disable the On-board Giga LAN, because this is what was causing the problem. I've always had it disabled, but now it is what's causing the system to hang on bootup. Oh well!
 
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