Shuttle XPC SN45G

[lelliott731]

Hey guys, below is the specs on my system:

Shuttle XPC SN45G (nForce 2 400 Ultra) Motherboard
AMD AthlonXP 2500+ (512k L2 Cache, 333MHz FSB) Processor
512MB PC2700 (2x256MB Samsung CL2.5) Memory
40GB Western Digital ATA100 Hard Drive
16/32/24/10 DVD/CD/CDR/CDRW Samsung Optical Drive
3.5" Samsung Floppy Drive
All In Wonder 7500 AGP 4x/2x Graphics Card
Creative Labs v.92 56k PCI Modem

Here's my issue, for some odd reason the card was working just fine. I upgraded the drivers to Catalyst 4.8 and when I restarted, the BIOS startup screen shows up, then the initial Windows XP startup screen appears, where the blue boxes move across the bottom of the screen, and then the video card stops displaying anything to the monitor, it's like it shuts off the DVI display port. The LCD gets no input what so ever. Then I tried to reboot the machine and go into the BIOS, well once again, the BIOS startup screen appears, tests the memory, and then when I hit the delete key, the screen goes blank, it doesn't turn off, but nothing is shown. I tried to upgrade the BIOS, by putting in a DOS boot disk with the new BIOS on it, and it reads the disk, boots into DOS, but once again, doesn't display anything on the screen. Once, a while ago, I was able to boot into Safe Mode, and I uninstalled the driver, and was able to get back into Windows, where I was able to upgrade a lot of the software, and then I upgraded to Service Pack 2, restarted, and I got past the initial Windows XP Startup screen that I talked about above, and this blue screen came up that had some white text on it that just said "Please Wait..." and a few more dots showed up after the initial ones, while the hard drive churned, then it rebooted, and that was it, it shut off the monitor again when it got past the initial Windows XP Startup Screen. I am really lost; any help would be greatly appreciated. I am going to go out and buy another graphics card to see if it's the card, or if it's the motherboard, or something else. Thanks for reading all this, if you have any questions just post them and I'll do my best to answer then, I really am confused about this one.

 

[MrE]

You need to run memtest on this box. Many times a faulty stick of memory won't appear as such until drivers are loaded which in your case would be video.You can also try removing one stick of memory and trying the reboot from there. Also,if you can go into safe mode, right click on my computer and choose manage. Choose Event Viewer and expand the sytem tree. Look for any and all failed events. This should help isolate either a mis-behaving driver, or, faulty hardware.

Regards,

-E

 

[marik25]

I have the first (non ultra) version of this system and I had a similar problem that was related to memory. There was some sort of incompatibility with the 2 sticks of DDR400 memory I had bought with the system. Either stick would work alone in the system, but put both of them and it would reboot or hang when loading windows XP. I ended up returning the memory for a newer version of the same brand (Kingwin TinyBGA) and everything worked fine. Funny thing is that I have now upgraded to 1GB of Ultra brand (quite generic I think) and there have been no problems.

I have a feeling that these systems might be a little sensitive to memory (at least the first versions) that may have not been worked out. My system is stable once it's set up, but I am always a little leery about changing memory or CPU.

I guess what I'm trying to say is check out the memory in your system. It has caused problems with my system and I wouldn't be surprised if it does the same in yours.

 

[lelliott731]

Thanks for the help, it turned out that the video card died, and in doing so, screwed up the LCD as well. I purchased a new graphics card and a new monitor, and everything is running great. I ran MemTest86 via a boot CD and it said all my memory was fine, I also ran the Burn In tests in SiSoft Sandra and it completed just fine. Thanks for your guys advice!