Re: Recent A8N-E installation crashes frequently
- From: "Frodo" <No_spam_I@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 14 Sep 2006 23:52:57 GMT
Asus A8N Forum
http://asustech.15.forumer.com/
"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
.
- References:
- Recent A8N-E installation crashes frequently
- From: Peter Bell
- Recent A8N-E installation crashes frequently
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