The I messed up my PC thread, help/thoughts please?

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ElaborateDream

Weaksauce
Joined
Jul 25, 2005
Messages
127
System specs are in Sig, also listed here for ease of reference.

ElaborateDream:
AMD64 X2 4400+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
ATI (BBA) X800XL PCI-Express
2Gb Corsair Value Select (2.5-4-4-8) PC3200
SBLive! 24-bit
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
dual WD 160GB SATA-II HDDs in RAID-1 on Nforce Controller
single Maxtor 80(60?)GB IDE HDD for booting.

So... Gaming along last night, 2am GTA:SA & Battlefield 2 joyousness. BF2 crashes to desktop, but oddly (even for BF2). Get a Windows message about d3d9.dll being screwy. Check DxDiag, and it's the DirectX 9.0 Direct 3D driver, as best I could tell, it's size was off, so I replaced it with a copy off my system backup. (no patches had happened in the meanwhile).

Reboot the system out of safe mode, and the OS loads. Kick up Trillian, and GTA. After 3 seconds of in-game play (rendered images, not menu) GTA dumps to desktop. System log tells me it was shut down to prevent damage to windows... Fire up BF2, and it dies after 2 minutes in game. As I'm looking at the details from that dumping, I get a stop error for NTFS.sys being screwy. Gotta love when the good stuff dies hard.

Reboot, make it into Windows fully, and it throws another Stop error after a few moments on the desktop.

Reboot yet again, and it's stop erroring as soon as it starts loading Windows.

Now, the fun part.

I'm in the reboot loop, preparing to hit F8, and a lighting strike hit the substation a bit downtown from me, the Rack-Grade surge suppressor took the hits just fine it seemed, but it wasn't until the third redundant transformer that one could handle the load. (so, power failure out at the transformer, that one bites it, next one tries & dies under load, same with the next, the last one, and I can hear this in my fountain across the room, and in my UPS'd system's fans (which scared me, as it was through a UPS) strains, browning out the power, and then rises to the challenge.

Check router and other connections, check breakers, everything seemed to have weathered.

Pop in 2k3 CD, attempt a repair install, and it stop errors, in NTFS.sys (gotta love how that driver covers FAT32 a well), about 30 minutes into the reinstall.

Play with that more, to the same result.

Do a clean reinstall, first to another partition, then deleting, and going over the prior partitions. Stop errors in NTFS.sys.

I've even disabled both RAID controllers on my motherboard, just in case, still NTFS.sys.

Think that maybe it's a fluke, and the NTFS.sys on the CD is bonked....

Grab Windows XP x64, and it errors out even later in the install, with a non-specific stop error, actually, one of three, including IRQ not less or equal (which always scares me deeply).

Next install of WinXP x64 goes on a clean/spare 160GB seagate IDE drive. It makes it to first reboot, then says that it can't find the operating system (missing, or damaged, two seperate error messages, I'll try to find their wording verbatim).

So...

I'm thinking it's either the RAM (always a chance), the IDE controller (but the CD-Rom does okay, and the HDD still errors on that channel).

This leaves me thinking that my best chance it to mount my SATA RAID-1 drives in this PC, verify their integrity, split the set, and make one of them my install drive for whichever OS gets put back on my box. (Probably XP x64)

The only things that are on this good box are installs of games I own, which is nice and easy to redo, the save files for GTA:SA, which I can save off of easily enough with this other PC I'm typing from, and copies of other documents, so it is fraggable, and not high-risk.

Thoughts, ideas, very simple easy things I've totally overlooked? Hope? Cheap/Easy ways of dealing with this problem, if indeed it is the IDE controller onboard (which is part of hte northbridge.... oh God, I hope it's not the NB). Can I RMA this to the Egg? Should I seek replacement under warantee from the Manufacturer? Am I out $150 for full functionality? Should I be banned from asking questions? Should I never post after 9pm at night once I've been drinking?

- Jones
 
i'd be running windows xp for a gaming machine...wonder if that's the problem...or the drinking. ;)
 
Just to make sure, no OCing I assume? all voltages default, and it does this with the bare minimum (no SB card in there!!)?

How's your power supply? Swap it out of you have one. Also, try totally resetting the bios with the jumper. Verify the temps on your CPU are kosher. If all that fails, I'd say RMA the darn MB. it's a cap or silicon going out of spec.
 
Thanks for the reply Dr. Lava.

Yeah, everything's running factory spec, actually, I think I loosened the timings on my ram slightly.

PSU appears okay, though I'll try swapping it in a few moments. and yes, I'm trying to install with one DIMM of ram, the video card, the CD drive, the one HDD, and my keyboard attached, so it's pretty minimalistic.

So, I'm gonna try rebuilding the BIOS, and my other PSU (420W generic should power a 4400+, video card in VESA-spec mode, and one HDD... yeah, that seems sane).
 
Nope, no luck there, trying to recreate my inital install with the OS on a extended partition, maybe that'll bring luck, though I doubt there's any soloution other than a RMA.
 
Some things to check if you haven't already:

Test the memory with memtest86, let it complete a few passes.
Test the hard drive(s) with the manufacturers diagnostics.
Test the PSU voltages with a voltmeter, not taking the BIOS readings as 100% accurate.
Check CPU temperatures.
Try another video card if you can, different memory sticks in different slots, etc.
 
It's the partitioning.

Wow.

When I first setup that PC, I made a Primary partition to put windows on, and an extended partition for the OS apps... but I screwed up in install, and put it on the extended partition, with only the MBR in the primary partition.

I did that again, and now it's booting.

Wow.

Talk about freakin' random.
 
ElaborateDream said:
It's the partitioning.

Wow.

When I first setup that PC, I made a Primary partition to put windows on, and an extended partition for the OS apps... but I screwed up in install, and put it on the extended partition, with only the MBR in the primary partition.

I did that again, and now it's booting.

Wow.

Talk about freakin' random.
Click to expand...

Really strange.. I was about to say that my best guess would be the HDD controller or the RAM. BTW, I wish everyone would post their questions in the form you did, it makes it much easier to look at a problem when you have all the information in one post in a readable format :) Glad you got it fixed.
 
I did kind of ramble on, but it was to provide as much detail as anyone would need.

It's stable, I've yet to re-device driver it, or mount my SATAs, I really hope the RAID-1 assures me of no data-loss, I wanna play more GTA :p

So, we'll see how the rest of today goes. : )
 
Wait, no, it's boned. Hard.

Now with random stop error goodness.

It's gotta be the motherboard, I'm gonna get in touch with my newegg account rep, and get this thing RMA'd Monday.

Fark.

Fark fark fark.
 
Its usually not the motherboard....

What sort of PSU areyou running? How are the rails?
 
Crappy PSU, but multimetered out I'm gettin 5.02 12.09. The bios is telling me 1.28, 3.28, 5.05 and 12.14
 
Memtest still hasn't thrown an error, but looking at the minidump and the stop code bing 0x8e... it's gotta be RAM, I'm now rebuilding with one stick of RAM in. I never liked this Corsair Value Select.

So, who's got a good reccomendation on a 2x1GB kit, for if this works? :D
 
Okay, so everything will load and run with only one DIMM.

So I've burned a new copy of MemTest, and am running that on all four DIMMs at PC3200/2T
 
I don't know if you want to treat yourself to the extreme low latency stuff, but for $183 you could get a gig of Corsair XMS 3200XLL 2-2-2-5-1T. It pretty nice to have a machine that has that kind of pep and responsiveness.
 
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