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This better not be anything obvious

F

FrothyByte

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Jun 24, 2001
Messages
1,672
Ok, I've been experiencing some wierd stuff.


First off, I will start out with my specs:
1.4 Athlon T-Bird
512 MB of Crucial PC2100 DDR (2x256 ECC Registered DIMMs)
Abit KG7-RAID
Enermax 350 Watt Power supply
8x4x32 Plextor CDR-W drive (Secondary Master)
IBM 40 Gig Deskstar HD (Primary Master)
ATI 9700Pro 128MB (AGP)
3Com 10/100 NIC (PCI slot 6)

I want to start off by saying that this configuration was in working condition for a very long time. ie. ~2 years It also had more hardware installed but due to me trying to narrow things down, I have removed the following hardware:
Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo II sound card
Second IBM Deskstar 40GB HD -- I broke my RAID 0 array and disabled the RAID controler in the BIOS
Unplugged case fans to reduce even more stress from the PS. (Don't worry everything is opened up and well ventilated)
I even ran it on one DIMM at a time but that didn't have any effect on the problems I was experiencing


PROBLEMS:
1. When I boot up, even before it starts loading the OS, sometimes, and yes it seems to be random, it will beep at me like I have no vid card installed. (One long beep and no VGA output as opposed to the quick beep one experiences on a normal boot up)
I have tried to re-seat the vid card, and also I tried a different vid card with no change. I have not tried a pci vid card due to the fact I don't have one.

2. When it does boot into the OS, everything will function ok until, again randomly, I get a BSOD. It may also give me a BSOD when booting into Windows.
The OS is WinXP SP1 and it is a fresh newly installed copy. I really don't have all that much time to read the BSODs but sometimes it is a DRIVER_NOT_EQUAL_TO or something like that when it BSODed in windows but if it BSODs while booting it looks as though it may have something to due with reading from a non-paged segment. That one goes really fast.

3. The wierdest thing of all is that the system can run for days before anything even happens. That is why this has been very frustrating to troubleshoot. I can not perdictably recreate the problems. It doesn't matter if I have 100% CPU utilization or if I have 10%, I could be in a game, or I could be just browsing the web, or the damn thing could just be sitting there idle. Oh yeah, I also have all of the power management stuff turned off in the BIOS and in Windows too.


Sorry for the long post, but I tried to guess what you would ask me and nip it in the bud right away.

The only thing I could think of initially was the power supply but I've basically got the bare minimum of things running in there.


Please any input would be very much appreciated.
 
try cleaning the dust and crap out from behind the CPU fan. those CPU get very hot and neet to be cooled as well as possible. if the heatsink is blocked by dust it can not do its job.
 
I second the ram. Then again almost anything you have hooked up could cause that.
 
RAM or power supply issue.

The two most common culprits for startup issues, BSODs and seemingly random problems.

BB
 
im willing to bet cockroach turds/parts/eggs on the video card.... its eather that or bad dust problems... it isnt driver isseus as he has trouble booting as well ... although they could be contributing to the problem, hmmm... check to see if your video card heat sink is on there firmly (with good paste) chek your ram modules /sockets and north bridge for cockroack parts... (eggs mostly)...

not assumeing that you have a roach problem... but i have worked on to many problems with roaches laying eggs near the ram sockets and roach eggs seem to cause the trouble they seem to be conductive. even if you kill every roach you see... there are 100 more you dont. out here (hawaii) we do have a pretty bad problem with them because it is a tropical enviroment that and lizards crawling into psu's and shorting them out... now thats a mess and a half... (exlopded gecko took out my sparkle 400w, as well as the mother moard)

thore
 
Thanks for all of the input.

The dusty fans I have already considered also. In fact I totally took everything out of my case, cleaned it, then put everyting back together.

I think that I will try and find a good deal on some RAM and or a power supply then see if it remedys the problem.

Thanks again everyone.
 
You might want to test the RAM to see if it comes up with errors.

Download memtest86, put it on a floppy, and boot the system with the floppy in the drive. It tests for errors caused by memory by testing all the RAM in the system. You want 0 errors.
 
Originally posted by BillLeeLee
You might want to test the RAM to see if it comes up with errors.

Download memtest86, put it on a floppy, and boot the system with the floppy in the drive. It tests for errors caused by memory by testing all the RAM in the system. You want 0 errors.
Click to expand...

Thanks.

I will try that first.
 
Originally posted by thore
im willing to bet cockroach turds/parts/eggs on the video card.... its eather that or bad dust problems... it isnt driver isseus as he has trouble booting as well ... although they could be contributing to the problem, hmmm... check to see if your video card heat sink is on there firmly (with good paste) chek your ram modules /sockets and north bridge for cockroack parts... (eggs mostly)...

not assumeing that you have a roach problem... but i have worked on to many problems with roaches laying eggs near the ram sockets and roach eggs seem to cause the trouble they seem to be conductive. even if you kill every roach you see... there are 100 more you dont. out here (hawaii) we do have a pretty bad problem with them because it is a tropical enviroment that and lizards crawling into psu's and shorting them out... now thats a mess and a half... (exlopded gecko took out my sparkle 400w, as well as the mother moard)

thore
Click to expand...


Oh my, that's disgusting :eek:
 
Originally posted by Misadventure
Oh my, that's disgusting :eek:
Click to expand...

I agree. If you weren't living in Hawaii, I'd have to say that I'd hate to live someplace where that was enough of a reoccurring problem to make it worth checking for.
 
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