Vista data corruption, XP machine check error

I

IdiotCow

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 28, 2006
Messages
307
Ok, so my computer is throwing a fit, and it's finally so bad that I have no choice but to do something about it.

Specs:
AMD X2 4200+ 2.2Ghz
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
2GB ram
NVIDIA GeForce 280 GTX
Antec PowerTrio 600w PSU

The problem:

My computer used to be mostly stable. I say mostly, because every now and then it wouldn't detect all of my hard drives at boot and would need to be powered down and cold booted to detect them. I had an iffy drive at that point so I figured it was causing a hang at post and making the drive detection go funny. That drive finally died and is being used as a doorstop in my livingroom.

About a year or so ago, I got Vista home premium x64... installed it, and all was good in the world - until a month later when my OS partition got corrupted. None of my data was touched, JUST drivers and other vista crud. Fine, whatever, format->reinstall (thinking at this point it was due to one of the power outages we had)

This ended up happening a couple more times, and always at the worst possible moment. AKA, paper due, day off to play video games, etc.. FINALLY I solved the problem by getting rid of the IDE drive I still had in the system. Switching over to SATA gave me 4 or 5 months of crash-free bliss.

Until a week ago. In the last week I've installed vista 3 times, and each time a few hours into it started showing signs of driver corruption (dlls "close unexpectedly", control panel items won't open, etc..) Also, the disappearing drive problem has reappeared at boot.

So I switched and decided to try XP.. which works, and doesn't get driver corruption. However, I get Machine Check Exceptions every couple hours. If I enable my wireless network card I get them every time I access the internet.

I've run memtest overnight with no errors, tested my PSU both at idle and load and there was little variance, I've had different combinations of hard drives in this machine and vista has been installed and corrupted on each one.

Oh and the real kicker? Linux shows NO sign of ANY problem. I used it for the last month of school last quarter because I couldn't take any risks with not being able to use my PC...

I'm thinking there's something wrong with the chipset on the motherboard. Thats why the hard drives disappear at boot.. also could be the reason the wireless card causes MCE's?

Any advice on this one is appreciated... I won the GTX in a contest, so I kinda want to upgrade anyways, anyone recommend a decent $300-400 CPU/MB/RAM combo to match the GTX 280? Or any thoughts on the problem in general?
 
Ooooh, an erratic problem. Bad hardware can cause the corruption you're seeing, the question is, which piece? I know you've already done the memory tests, but do you have some spare sticks you could swap out for? I personally doubt it's them, but it's one of the easier tests.

Next up, it might be one of your add-on cards. Since enabling the wifi card is obviously causing problems, pull it, see if the problems do/don't return. I have seen crappy wireless cards cause all sorts of problems, normally bluescreens though. Next would be the graphics card (is it overheating by chance, as that can cause some weird voodoo).

From here, since you said you've been having weird problems from the start, I'd be looking at that motherboard. It's the biggest piece, but judging by the symptoms, my money would be on a fault there.
 
I had an interesting memory related problem that was quite similar to this. The machine would run fine for a couple days. Then, I'd get similar problems. Massive amounts of data corruption if I was writing anything to the disk or network, eventually it would blue screen its self with some driver problem. If I restarted it seemed to be better and would work for a couple days again. If I ran memtest86+ overnight, it would be fine. It seemed as though it would suddenly just start messing up, and turning it off for a bit would fix it.

Finally, while it was crashing and messing up I restarted it into memtest86+ and sure enough there were tons of errors instantly. If I turned it off and let it sit for a bit, it would pass. It took over the normal 6-12 hours you'd run memtest for to get the errors, but they were there. Replaced the memory and haven't had a single problem in a month.
 
so far the system has been pretty stable in XP 32bit with the wireless card disabled in device manager. The card is a linksys 300N wireless card that has no problems in linux... and I didn't have it at all when the corruption started in vista... so if anything I think the PCI bus might be frakked... does the pci bus run the hard drive controller?

I don't have any spare memory, but at this point I'm looking at upgrading my MB/CPU/RAM anyways, so I guess this might just be the catalyst for my purchase. Just need that tax refund.. ugh!
 
All you do is game?

A cheap Intel build would be an E7300 ($120), GA-EP43-DS3L ($80), and 4GB of DDR2-800 for $40 or under. Cheaper? drop the CPU down to E5200 ($80). OC either CPU to at least 3.0Ghz w/ stock cooler. Pickup a Xigmatek HDT-S1283 to push either to 3.6Ghz+. Ideally, you'd want the E8400/E8500/E8600 (cheaper of the three; or a Q6600, depending if you actually need 4 cores).

A cheap AMD build would be the 7750 BE ($80), GA-MA770-DS3P ($80), and 4GB of DDR2-800 for $40 or less. I'm not sure on the mobo, but someone can offer alternatives. Upgrades? The quadcore 9850 is a nice price at $150, but not if you don't need all 4 cores.

If you OC, go with Intel. If not, go with AMD.
 
Awsome! Thanks for the help! Sucks when hardware fails, but hey - I needed a reason to upgrade right?

On ram, is there any real advantage to buying ram with better timings with DDR2? I'm looking at newegg and seeing even the top tier only being 4-4-4-12

Seemed like this is more important with DDR than DDR2?
 
Indeed, you won't notice a difference between CL4 and CL5, unless you're running benchmarks (and even then, the difference is negligible), so don't pay a huge price premium for lower latency.
 
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