Strangest thing ever

[Imperium97 0]

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.

[Palos 0]

What does the bluescreen say? How about sharing that precious info with us?

[OLEerror 0]

It sounds like the hard drive controller on your motherboard is going out. Can you try the drives in a different computer to see if they are accessible?

[Alien 1]

This does actually sound like something that happened to me recently. My board [TMC TI5VGA] has 3 RAM slots, but it didn't seem to like having all 3 filled with 128MB each, despite the fact that it's supposed to be able to do that. I tried a 64MB stick instead of 1 of the 128s & it worked ok [1x64 + 2x128], & after trying various combinations of the sticks I had it seemed like 1 in particular was to blame, so I sent it back for replacement. When I got the replacement I shut everything off, took the 64MB stick out, & replaced it with the 128MB - that's when my problems really began.

 

I managed to get into XP, but then after a while ended up with a BSOD, then on reboot it ran checkdisk & everything seemed to be ok, but same happened again, so whole thing was repeated. I guessed that maybe a file might have gotten corrupted so tried running SFC from safe mode, but it didn't want to work, so decided to try last resort of using scandisk & FDISK /MBR from a 98SE boot disk - both of which I have done before when I've had probs with XP & it has either solved the prob or @ least not created any new ones. This time Scandisk said that 1 of the copies of the FAT table was corrupted so it replaced it with the backup copy - having done that before I didn't think anything was wrong with that so let it do it. After reboot I discovered that I know only had a few MB free out of a 5GB partition which should have had over 1GB free & I couldn't see what should be there & what was there was gibberish, so I just took the 128MB stick outm put the 64 back in & deleted the partition & reinstalled. Hopefully when I get my new mobo I'll be able to use all 3 128MB sticks.

 

PS - I forgot to mention, I tried doing a repair from the install option thing before I tried the scandisk & FDISK /MBR things but that went weird as well.

[Imperium97 0]

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.

[DosFreak 2]

Download and run this: http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/

 

Check the cooling on that processor.

[Imperium97 0]

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.

[Imperium97 0]

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.