DaFrawg

I really need some answers on this, it's driving me crazy... The last time that I booted in Windows XP Professional, the keyboard and the mouse stopped working after everything was loaded. Until then, they worked. Moving, clicking, scrolling: no cursor response. Num, Caps, Scroll Lock: the LEDs on my keyboard were frozen. Windows was working though. The WLAN icon was flashing and the system reacted properly when I pressed the power button on my case (soft Windows shutdown). After I replugged my mouse from the PS/2 port (PS/2-USB convertor) to the USB port, I was able to use my mouse and to use the On-Screen Keyboard (osk.exe in system32). When I looked in the Device Management (yes, hidden drives were shown as well), there was no sign of any keyboard, not even in the HID list (but it normally was under the keyboard node). Also, the device tab in Keyboard settings (of the Control Panel) didn't show any keyboards at all. I tried to scan for new devices. No success. I tried to install the keyboard driver, but there was no driver in the list at all, and most drivers turned out to be disappeared or replaced by a line of absolute garbage (screenshot at http://abs.gprime.net/normal.jpg, my system language is Dutch by the way. 'Algemeen' means 'Generic'.). So I grabbed the WinXP setup cd, copied the files KEYBOARD.SY_, KEYBOARD.DR_ and KEYBOARD.IN_ to a folder, extracted them using "expand" and tried to install the .inf file. No success. The file names were correct, but Windows reported something like "the device specified in the file was not found on the system". This probably means that the PS/2 controller is turned off or not recognised by Windows. But Fedora Core 2 can work perfectly with the keyboard and the mouse. It doesn't matter where the mouse is, either PS/2 or USB works great. Also, the BIOS tells me that all PS/2 features (they were scattered over several menus :x) were enabled. So I tried to reinstall Windows after I backed up everything I wanted to keep. I boot the PC from the CD (pressed Enter to indicate that I actually wanted that), I get the blue installation screen, I don't press F6 to install non-Microsoft drivers or F2 to start a system recovery, drivers get loaded, screen gets black, screen gets back to blue and I get the initial menu that tells me to press Enter (Install), R (Recovery Console) or F3 (exit setup). Same symptoms: all mode control keys don't work (Num, Caps, Scroll)(the LEDs's status don't change), and pressing Enter, R or F3 doesn't do anything. I would really like to know what the hell is going on. Why became all Windows drivers for PS/2 suddenly incompatible with my PS/2 devices? Now for some system specs, in case it matters: Motherboard: ASUS A7V8X-X (the one with LAN and Audio) Processor: AMD AthlonXP 2800+ (333 MHz FSB) RAM: 2 x Kingston 128 MB, 266 MHz (reason that my proc can only run at 1,7 GHz) Keyboard: Azona PS/2 keyboard (generic) Mouse: Logitech Trackman (?) USB (with USB to PS/2 converter) I think other devices are irrelevant. In case you can give me a hint (except for cleaning up my motherboard, reconnecting it, resetting BIOS, trying other PS/2 devices, because I have tried that without any positive results), I thank you in advance. I badly need to run in Windows, since all my media is on NTFS and Linux can't change any files on that partition (it's on the primary slave HDD, not the master).

Yes, I have downloaded and installed the most recent drivers for everything in my system, yes, I have Googled on this, yes, I have cleaned my motherboard, yes, I have done several virus and spyware checks. It occurs sometimes (not all the time, just sometimes) though that my system freezes for no actual reason. It was always right after asking for what drives the PC has - I had it twice opening explorer (no, not Internet Explorer, just the "My Computer" thing), once when I tried to add a file to Winamp's playlist and once when I tried to save a document from Word. The symptoms are always the same: - My IDE LED (motherboard connector) flashes, the LED of the secondary IDE master (DVD player from Toshiba) is also flashing, but the other drives work fine (I can still "use" the secondary slave). - Processor load is most of the time 0%. - Every minute the system completely freezes, but after ten seconds it runs again, but one minute later it happens again, and again, and again. At that moment the processor load is 100%. - The process that visibly crashed during the operation (not redrawn, but the client area is erased though) can't be terminated using Task Manager. - Only thing that helps is a reboot. - After rebooting there is a new entry in my CurrentVersion/Run thingy, something like "dumprep 0 -r" (I'm not sure of that -r). I'm running on Windows XP Professional SP2, Windows Update all done (except for Media Player 10, but who needs that...). My motherboard is an ASUS A7V8X-X, my proc is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ (333 MHz FSB, 2.08 GHz clock), I have two memory slots occupied by Kingston RAM (both 128 MB on 266 MHz). My video card is an ASUS FX5700LE 128MB (on AGP) and I also have a Wireless NIC (Realtek 8180 chipset). My pagefile is about 512 MB at minimum. I have the following IDE drives installed: Primary IDE Master: Maxtor 40 GB HDD (WinXP, GRUB, Fedora Core 2 are located on that drive on different partitions) Primary IDE Slave: Maxtor 120 GB HDD (just some Media on NTFS) Secondary IDE Master: Toshiba DVD-ROM player Secondary IDE Slave: Lite-on CD-RW burner I have once resized my WinXPProf partition with Partition Magic 9 or 10, after I defragmentated the partition twice using the standard XP tool (and I defragged it afterwards a couple of times)(to make some space for Fedora). That's about it, except for the remark that I really need a solution to this. It's stressing me out.

Well, I got sick of those freezes, so I reinstalled Windows. I hope it was just a temporary flaw.

Solved it. I downgraded the BIOS version. Somehow the bugfix ASUS made resulted in a bug for me.

Originally posted by skulz: Quote: It now tells me that i have a high-speed device plugged into a low speed USB hub. That seems to be a bug in Windows XP, since my father's USB TV Tuner (Pinnacle) is sometimes having that problem too. It was reported on support.microsoft.com once, but I can't find it anymore. It had something to do with the EHCI drivers.

Originally posted by DaFrawg: Quote: (to be continued) Well, well... I had a similar 'crash' yesterday, but it was totally different this time. I reinstalled my DVD player and left it empty. Worked fine. I used my DVD player to rip some CDs, to play some audio from it, and it worked fine. I put the Halo CD back in, no problems. But suddenly... my system freezes every two seconds for a very short period (less than 0.5 s). I check my IDE, but it is not really doing something. I check my processes using that SysInternals tool and notice that the Interrupt handlers are using 30% of my CPU. I check my Wireless network card status and I notice that it's sending packets like a madman. So I disable it. Still, 30% CPU load. I enable and uninstall my onboard LAN (not connected). Ah, 0% CPU load. I reenable my Wireless LAN NIC and I have a normal WLAN connection again. I would swear that I have disabled NetBIOS, which has been fucking up my media playback until last week. Because I disabled it by then. I don't know if it was NetBIOS though, since I didn't fire Ethereal up when it during that freeze-unfreeze period. I should do that next time. This might seem a bit irrelevant, but I think this does have to do something with the other system freezes. The NIC I'm using by the way is a Sweex LC700010 (Realtek 8180 chipset). I do have the latest drivers by the way.

I ran it on XP Prof as well, using a SiS 740 (:x). Worked perfectly for me. I didn't try it yet on my new configuration (with a FX5700LE).

Originally posted by adamvjackson: Quote: Here's what I think, saberquill. The difference that the BIOS is seeing is 1KB=1000 Bytes, instead of 1KB=1024 Bytes, which is correct. As for task manager reporting 480MB, I would bet with a 99% certianty that you have an intergrated video card that is using 32MB of "shared" RAM. Assuming I am correct, what you report would be normal. Right, that can be the thing... did you assign some memory to your video controller? You can check this in your BIOS (sometimes it's called aperture size). Don't change it by the way. If it's using some memory, it probably needs it.

Yes. Both the WinXPHome and WinXPProf CD have a feature to delete or create partitions. In fact, the only good way to install Windows XP (and all other Windows versions between 95 and XP) is to install it on a perfectly clean partition.

Originally posted by adamvjackson: Quote: Does this only happen when a disc is present in the DVD drive? Do you have any issues using the drive in FC2? Sorry, I have not tried it yet. Quote: In Device Manager, go to "View" and enable "Show hidden devices". Well, the CD I used to have in that drive is the Halo CD, which is protected with SafeDisk. But there are no hidden devices under the "DVD-/CD-ROM-players" node. Quote: A possible alternative is that the DVD drive is failing... That's quite possible, since the Windows Kernel is really busy with the DVD at those times (like I said, TaskMan doesn't show any CPU load at that time, except for every time a freeze has stoppped, but I don't know what process did that) and it sometimes just forgets to leave some system resources for the other applications. Quote: You might want to try using SysInternal's Process Explorer (it's freeware) to see what is running when the problem occurs. It's similar in nature to Task Manager, but more comprehensive. I'll try it, thanks for the hint. I've also tried to disable the drive (it now has a nice red cross over it in the Device Manager), and I have had no problems since I've done that. (to be continued)