Asus P4P800-E Deluxe intermittently hangs on boot/POST

[gexamb]

hey guys, have a new one for yall.

I have a custom pc: Asus p4p800-e deluxe mobo, 2.8 ghz intel cpu, 1 gb kingston ram, evga 7600gs agp card, audigy 2 zs sound card cooled with zalman reserator 1+ I have had this system for almost 5 years now and I have never overclocked this system before.

i have two problems actually:

1) my sound card i think is dead or dying on me. I reverted to the onboard audio currently. i have to play around with the analog/speaker cable going into the card for it to send the sound to my speakers. this also has to do with the speaker wire but, when i move around the sound cable in its slot on the sound card, the pc freezes. if i unplug it and plug it back in it still freezes? anything on this?

2) this freezing thing all started one day i was playing RCT3. randomly the pc would hang while playing the game. so i had to hard reboot every time this happened. this did not happen when the cpu was not under intense usage ie gaming. then i noticed that the pc would hang/freeze coming out of standby mode, which i have never experienced before. I turn the pc on from standby mode, i see the welcome screen and it would freeze or it would make it to the desktop pic and would freeze then, it does not fully load the desktop before it freezes.

next problem was upon start up or reboot, the monitor would not detect a video signal at all. I tried playing around with the video card, reseating it, wiggling it, using different monitors, playing with the vga cables until i get a video signal. so it turns out it is not from the vga cable or monitor because i used other ones with the same effect. then i finally get a video signal randomly and intermittently. at first most of the time i would not get a signal. but now i get a video signal every time i start up the system. now the bios hangs at post. i press tab to see the post process and this the order in what happens for the system to boot all the way to windows. (xp sp3):

1st boot, bios hangs on Checking NVRAM.....
2nd boot, bios hangs on checking for ide and sata drives/cd-roms
3rd boot, boots straight to windows with no problems

it is like this all the time, it always boots to windows on the 3rd try each and every time.

i am guessing that this is from my mobo as it is more than 5 years old or my agp card or agp slot is no good. although my agp card is a rather recent card, less than 2.5 years I have owned it. I suspect the agp slot is failing as it hangs on intense cpu usage (gaming) and it hangs on bios checking NVRAM which is the cga card ram, right?

what do you guys think i can do or test? any suggestions or experience with similar problems like this?

btw bios is updated to the latest final version, running on 2 sata drives, sometimes my slave drive is not recognized, vga card running on latest drivers, and it still hangs startup from standby.

thanks in advance.

 

[B00kWyrm]

Let's look at minidumps for more information

Thanks for providing your system specs, including OS and Service Pack (SP)...
( Asus etc, xp, sp3))

Let's look at "minidumps" and/or "events" for more information

Attach three or four of your most recent minidump files to your next post,
Let's see what kind of information is there.

If you do not know how to attach a file, see this thread
https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic15592.html

If you do not know about minidumps, they are located in their own subfolder ("minidump") of your Windows folder.
If you want to learn more about Minidumps and how to interpret them... Start here...
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263

I am suggesting that you post the minidump files so that someone with a little experience can review them, and find some diagnostic clues... This may or may not provide the help we need, depending on whether Windows was able to create the files before abruptly closing on you.

Another diagnostic approach is through event viewer... See
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308427

Once we have some more information, we may want to have this thread re-titled to be more descriptive.

Afterthought:
Have you absolutely ruled out the possibility of Virus or other Malware?

 

[gexamb]

ok here are my minidumps. i did not think of minidumps before because i never received an error message or what not but I have 2 of them around the same time this problem started happening. they are attached.

and i absolutely have no viruses or malware, i keep a very clean system.

 

[B00kWyrm]

The first is

BugCheck 100000D0, {8, 2, 0, 8054e661}
DRIVER_CORRUPTED_MMPOOL (d0)
An attempt was made to access a pageable (or completely invalid) address at an
interrupt request level (IRQL) that is too high. This is caused by drivers that have corrupted the system pool. Run the driver verifier against any new (or suspect) drivers, and if that doesn't turn up the culprit, then use gflags to enable special pool. You can also set HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management\ProtectNonPagedPool to a DWORD 1 value and reboot. Then the system will unmap freed nonpaged pool, preventing drivers (although not DMA-hardware) from corrupting the pool.

The second is

DEFAULT_BUCKET_ID: GRAPHICS_DRIVER_FAULT
CUSTOMER_CRASH_COUNT: 1
BUGCHECK_STR: 0xEA
PROCESS_NAME: explorer.exe

I would suspect that the first is likely related to your sound card issue. You suspected it was going flakey/buggy on you.
If the card is going buggy, then it would seem to me that this minidump would still apply.

I would suggest therefore...
1. removal of the sound card, and see if problems remain (without the sound, though obviously).
2. update the video drivers, because the second dump is specifically video related.
3. to avoid potential conflicts, even though conflicts may not always happen, be sure to remove all old drivers for the old sound card before installing the new one,
4. replace the sound card.
5. and (just playing a hunch here)... run memtest just to make sure it has not gone buggy too.
6. I see your system is 5 years old... Is the drive defraged and checked for errors?

I am going to ask a friend to weigh in here too, though I know others are watching, perhaps including him.

 

[gexamb]

i defrag my drive every now and then but it really never reaches above 20% fragmented, BUT my hardrive, at least the OS one, is also 5 years old. its a samsung sp1213c and it intermittently makes some random noises at times. i think it is on its death bed but i have run tests on it and have looked at the SMART monitoring and have used speed fan's check thingy to confirm it is still fine. works at about 90% or something like that. have not checked for errors in quite a while.

so i should remove sound card, remove drivers, re-install sound card and new drivers? should i also remove the onboard sound drivers, cuz thats the only thing i am running on now, and if it helps i did not have any onboard sound drivers installed when i was using my pci card.

run memtest on the ram right?

will give it a go for the video card as well.