Imperium97

How about an update Catdog? 4&20,why is your signature so big? Just curious.

Hi folks, I could really use some help. I have a p4 1.8 with a Shuttle AV40, 768MB pc2100 crucial DDR, Asus GF3, SBLive!, etc. I'm running XP pro and have been on this very same system since release and have never had a problem...until now. On saturday I was playing Star Trek: Bridge Commander when I got a bluescreen. I rebooted, same thing. Again, same thing. I decided I'd try repairing the XP installation when I noticed it couldn't even pick up my drive as an NTFS drive. The XP installation was telling me my main partition was of 'unknown file format'. Needless to say this worried me. I installed XP on a back up HD and set my main drive to slave and noticed I could now see files off of it. I backed up all my important stuff, burned my backups and then my computer started rebooting itself everytime windows loaded. Then it started hardlocking. I cussed and then put my main drive back to master and started to format when the damn thing froze in the middle of a format (wtf!?). A few tries later it formatted, windows installed but it was hardlocking every few boots. By now I decided this has to be a hardware issue, and not just an XP issue. Has anyone experienced anything like this? I ran a few cpu and memory benchmarks in sisoft sandra and it froze in the memory benchmarks leading me to believe it was the memory. When I narrowed it down to the guilty dimm I ran the benchmarks 10 times each in a loop and it ran fine. I thought the problem was solved but no such luck. Next reboot had a hardlock and then a bluescreen. Still no luck, i'm on the system now but it's pretty unstable. I'm now thinking it's the motherboard but what do you guys think? There has been no consistency in errors, each bluescreen was different and hardlocks came at seemingly random times, nothing has been consistent. Anyone have anything similar happen? Any input would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Well, thanks to all who helped. I have been running relatively stable for 2 days. All it took was the removal of my 3rd stick of ram and the addition of a promise Ultra100 TX2 ATA controller. I'm going to swap out this motherboard and replace it with a gigabyte 8IRX, I'm a little tired of dealing with VIA stuff. Plus, I'd like to get a northwood anyway :-) Thanks again.

I really have no idea but it sounds similar to this: http://www.tweakxp.com/TweakXP/display.asp?id=822 I hope that helps out.

Thanks for the link. The cpu is fine, HS is attached and fan working, temps are normal. If it was a heat issue the p4 would just throttle down anyway.

Hey, thanks for responding. Palos, none of the bluescreens have been the same. I've had some that point to nothing in particular, they just say there was an error, a few ram dumps, a few IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL's, and a few others that I honestly can't remember. I'm inclined to believe what OLEerror has said. Both hard drives are fine in other computers. Alien, we definately have some similarities. I've actually read about VIA motherboards having issues with 3 sticks of ram in 3 slots, for some reason they can cause problems for some people. What's stange though is until saturday, i've been running with 3-256 sticks since XP came out (even before with all the RC's) without a problem.

Corporate and Pro are the same but corporate usually comes with a volume license key and you don't have to worry about activation.

On the original post about VIA, I have to agree. Personally, I haven't had any problems. My soyo 7VCA worked flawlessly and I was completely satisfied. I'm currently using a Shuttle AV40 which uses VIA's new P4x266 chipset and I haven't had one problem yet. This board is faaast too. Can't say I've had any problems with the 4in1's either. I ran 2k on my 7VCA and had 2k on my AV40 but now i'm running XP pro.