Re: Looking for some help.

spammersdienow! wrote:

Original poster here. The same problem continues. I have installed
XP on three different HDs, all of which were in the system for the two
years it worked fine. Two of them were in a RAID striping array,
which held the OS, and one was an extra HD, which never held the OS.
I have removed the RAID array, and have used all three to try to get
XP running, and I get the same thing--smooth install, start to use the
machine, 30 seconds, freeze. (For what it's worth, the NUMLOCK key is
live on the keyboard; and when the freeze happens, the mouse cursor
continues to move for a few more seconds, but clicking does nothing,
then the mouse cursor freezes).

I downloaded Ubuntu, burned an ISO to a CD, and ran it from the CD-ROM
drive. It worked fine, no freezing. Does this suggest that it's not
the mobo or a power problem and most likely the HD's?

Is it possible that I got some sort of virus that infected all my
HD's, and despite (XP-level) formatting, is causing the problem?

My current thoughts: buy and try a clean new HD or buy a new mobo.

Here's the system:

Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9 mobo/Athlon 64 3500 Winchester/EVGA GeForce 6800GS
video card/Mushkin 2GB DDR400 RAM/Thermaltake 480W power supply/2
Samsung and 1 Raptor HDs.

Thanks to all for the suggestions and guidance! Please keep helping
if you can!


It is encouraging that Ubuntu doesn't demonstrate the same symptoms.

Things I'd try:

1) Under Ubuntu, go to mersenne.org and get the Linux version of Prime95.
There is a statically linked and a dynamically linked executable, and
you can try both, until you find something that works. Run the torture
test from the menu. "Blend" is fine. That will run the CPU at 100%
and exercise things a bit more. Prime95 is used as a stability test
by overclockers, and it will stop on the first error it finds. It
should be able to run for hours.

Unfortunately, doing a graphics test that uses hardware acceleration,
is not an easy thing to do in Linux. AFAIK, the default driver scheme
uses software for everything. Nvidia and ATI have binary driver packages
(closed source so not something that the distro can support politically),
and getting a game to run would also be a chore. You're on your own
there. It took me a couple of days of fiddling around, just to get
the Nvidia package loaded (I like to read the howto before doing it).

2) Under Windows, how many drivers are loaded when the system freezes up ?
Is a network driver loaded yet ? What about safe mode ? Try to figure
out what things contribute to the problem.

I don't see a reason to buy any more disk drives. If you want to hardware
test the disk drives, the disk manufacturers have diagnostics you can
download. Run those if you want to give the disks and the hardware
interfaces a workout.

In terms of power consumption, I would think that Linux might be a bit easier
on the supply (since graphics cannot really be loaded up). At the 30 second
mark in Windows, you would have some number of tray icons (startup items)
loading. The graphics driver in Windows would have initialized pretty early
when the desktop appears. Sometimes, the graphics have a "helper" that is
a startup item, and that could be loading at the 30 second mark.

Once you get Prime95 running in Ubuntu, you'll get a little bit more
load on the PSU, to test for thermal or power problems.

One test you can do against a frozen machine, is try to ping it from
another machine. To do that, you'd need to know the IP address of the
frozen machine. Easy enough to do if your router box has a restricted
set of DHCP addresses set up, or you have given the freezing machine
a static address. If the machine responds to a ping, and yet the
screen is frozen, that might suggest a graphics subsystem problem.
Looking in the Event Viewer, for an error message, might be an idea
in that case.

Paul
.

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