Re: Recent A8N-E installation crashes frequently

My 2 months old A8N-E still crash once in a while.
Have really figured out why is crashs
Have replaced Power supply, switch from Generic 600 Watt to Antec 550 Watt,
Also replace graphics card,
moved memory to different slots (2 X1GB DDR500).
Switch from Audigy 2 ZS to built in sound, then back to Audigy.
Even wiped hard drive and reinstalled Win XP (SP2 version)


Have you updated to the latest BIOS (1013)?
If so, try clearing the BIOS.
Unplug the power cord from the back of the power supply, or from the wall
socket.
Then move the CLRTC jumper for 10 seconds, then put it back to normal
plug the power cord back in.
BIOS will be back to default setting,
turn on computer and go into BIOS & put thing back to the way you had them.
I usually turn off Serial & Parallel ports.

It might be the power supply

"Peter Bell" <peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ef8c2c664e.peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
About a month ago I built up a new system comprising:
Asus A8N-E Mobo
Athlon 64 3500+ processor
MSI GeForce 6200TC video card
Samsung SATA 160GB drive
A 512MB PC2100 memory stick from my old system.
A 450W PSU, branded as 'X-Power'

Some of the peripherals have been retained from a previous
configuration, but I don't believe that they're implicated in the
problems I'm about to describe.

When I initially put the system together I attempted to load from a Win
2k, SP2 distribution. This would fail very early in the install and I
suspected some incompatibility between W2k/SP2 and the SATA disk system.

I then moved on to loading the system from a WinXP home SP2
distribution. This was not without problems, but I did manage to get
the system up and running.

However, the system was producing lots of BSODs, frequently
'DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL', implicating various system drivers (eg
HTTP.SYS, IPNAT.SYS).

First of all, I replaced the memory with 2 512MB PC3200 sticks, from
Crucial, using their recommendation for this particular motherboard.
This didn't appear to have any significant effect on the problem.

After some research I discovered that the NVIDIA firewall which comes
with the system was not the most robust of software and de-installed it.

This made the system almost usable - it will run for more than an hour,
but it is still a little fragile and certain operations are quite likely
to generate a windows error (for instance, Firefox will crash
frequently, whilst IE6 is reasonably robust) with the occasional BSOD
still occuring. The MS error reporting system almost always blames a
device driver for these problems.

More research turned up a recommendation of setting the memory voltage
to 2.7V, which I did yesterday, and I was still getting program crashes
and a BSOD.

I found Memtst86 and ran this overnight with the following results:

Tst Pass Failing Address Good Bad Err-Bits
5 2 0002eb4acf8 - 747.6MB ffffffff 7fffffff 80000000
5 2 0002fb4acd8 - 763.6MB ffffffff 7fffffff 80000000
5 7 0000eac64b8 - 234.3MB ffffffff 7fffffff 80000000
5 7 0000fac6498 - 250.3MB ffffffff 7fffffff 80000000
5 8 0001eee22b8 - 494.1MB ffffffff 7fffffff 80000000
5 8 0001fee2298 - 510.1MB ffffffff 7fffffff 80000000
5 23 0001ef073f8 - 495.4MB ffffffff efffffff 10000000
5 23 0001ff073d8 - 511.4MB ffffffff efffffff 10000000


Now, I find these results interesting:
Many passes are successful, but when there's a failure, there are always
two together, always ffffe0 locations apart, and it's only test 5 which
fails - the 'all ones' test. I was ready to believe that it was only
the highest bit which was failing until the pass 23 failure popped up
this morning.

Now, I have to believe that the operational problems I'm having are
related to this apparent memory problem - at least it's not worth
further investigations before I've fixed this.

So, I'm looking for some advice .... first of all, I trust that these
failures cannot be related to any peripherals connected via the PCI
system - this must eliminate the expansion card bus, as well as any
motherboard systems such as SATA, IDE, sound, network etc.

I guess the next thing to try is swapping the memory sticks over and
seeing whether the pattern changes. I could even go back to the old
single PC2100 stick and see what results I get with that.

However, I wonder whether anyone has any other suggestions - is this a
recognisable problem/pattern, is it likely to be a faulty memory stick
or a mobo fault (or, maybe, processor, or PSU)? I can't see anything
else being implicated here. All fans are running and system
temperatures appear to be low - usually reported as being around 35C.

All advice gratefully received, and thanks for reading this far.

--
Peter Bell - peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


.

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