Re: XP Setup hangs with dual PIII-550 on Asus P2B-DS v1.04



Roger Hamlett wrote:

"P2B" <p2b@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:eLz4f.4907$ns3.134796@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Roger Hamlett wrote:


"Nir Gilboa" <gilboa.nir@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:4352ac4f$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


Hi

I've tried letting the Setup program determine the HAL, but what happens is it hangs at "Setup is starting Windows..." even before entering the graphical part.

I've also tried making xp setup disks and doing the same thing - letting setup determine the HAL. Same thing happens - hangs at "Setup is starting Windows...". The second time I tried this I got a BSOD that says PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA with 0x0000050 - and I couldn't find that error on MS's support site.

Also i'd like to mention I am using BIOS 1014.Beta003 with MPS 1.4 disabled and that the processors are exactly identical SL3F7 and SL3FJ.

Another thing I tried over the weekend is opening up the pc and cleaning dust off the Slot 1's, the mb and the SEC cartridges, but no luck so far.

These results suggest something might be wrong with the motherboard - but believe me it has been working just fine with XP Pro (SP2) and one PIII550. Also I used to run W2K with dual PII350 without so much as a hiccup.

What else can I possibly do to troubleshoot this problem ? Any help is appreciated - I am totally stumped here.

Nir

You haven't said what disk configuration you have?. As I have already posted, I have seen this type of behaviour, when I tried to configure such a system with only SCSI drives attached, or with only an IDE CD.

I've never connected an IDE device to any of my P2B-DS boards, and have never had such problems. However, I agree knowing details of the OP's disk configuration could well facilitate the diagnosis.

Have you seen it take a very long time booting into W2K/WXP?.

Never - except when certain USB devices were connected, but that's an entirely different can of worms :-)

If so, this is caused by the same problem. It didn't happen on the first boards/BIOS's, but some time latter, there was a BIOS change, that caused this problem. I went through a dozen P2B variants, and several BIOS versions, and all would display it in some configurations. It was however very 'odd' in terms of the patterns that gave it. For example, I had a system that ran W2K fine, once installed, but would always crash on the install, if using an IDE CD, but copying the disk to the SCSI HD, and installing from this worked fine. Another system installed perfectly the first time, but changing to a latter CD drive, introduced this behaviour. Five drives latter, from different manufacturers, it evntually worked again. The problem particularly appeared when there was an IDE CD from particular manufacturers, but only SCSI HD's.

Perhaps I've never seen it because I've always used SCSI HDs *and* SCSI CD-ROMs.

There was also a seperate issue, that might apply in this case, relating to the video card, and the SCSI BIOS. Some video cards caused a problem with the SCSI BIOS on these machines during boot. There is an area in the upper memory block, that is incorrectly flagged during bootup, and in some cases leads to both the SCSI system, and the video, trying to map stuff to the same address. Some families of video cards, never really worked...

Haven't encountered that either. Closest I've come was a P2B-AE (Sony VAIO OEM board) with it's drives on an Adaptec 2940U2W that consistently lost video partway through XP setup. Turned out to be a BIOS conflict, updating the 2940 BIOS fixed it. I've never run into a video card that wouldn't work - but it would be interesting to know if the OPs video card is one that I've used.

Seperately, has this board got the fix for the interrupt problem?. There was a fault on these boards, which in an ACPI configuration, led to non-stop interrupts being generated, hanging/killing the system. This was fixed by moving one resistor on the board. The default XP install would use ACPI, and since this appears to make the fault worse, it may be that your board has not got the fix. There used to be board pictures of the rework on the Asus site. This problem only showed in SMP configurations, so might be related....

That was strictly a cosmetic issue, at least in W2K, according to Asus - the CPU meter never dropped below 50%.

Hardly 'cosmetic'. It was caused by the ACPI interrupt continuously triggering, and the CPU handling these, basically sits 'flat out' doing little else. It normally did not cause install problems on W2K, but I have seen it give trouble on XP.


I once had a dozen or so P2B-DS 1.04 boards sent in at once for the ACPI fix, so I did some testing with the first one. I installed W2K (no problem), confirmed it had picked the ACPI Multiprocessor HAL, observed the CPU meter pegged at 50% on an idle system, and ran benchmarks. After moving the resistor, the CPU meter dropped as expected but there was no significant change in the benchmark results.

I have not run an equivalent test using XP, but I would expect similar results.

P2B

Depends on the benchmark. Most benchmark tests, only use one processor. Try a compile that supports SMP, and the time needed reduces directly in line with the change in processor useage.

The benchmark I used did support SMP - at least Task Manager showed 100% utilisation of both processors while it was running, and the results led me to conclude the ACPI issue was strictly cosmetic - as claimed by Asus. It seems reasonable the ACPI hardware issue would cause spurious interrupts, however my tests found no performance impact as a result.

P2B
.

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