I blamed SATA but I was wrong - Help!

[scotty23]

Hello All!

I recently purchased an upgrade for an old tower. The upgrade included:

• Albatron KM51 Series Socket 939 Mobo with NForce 4 chipset
• AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Venice) CPU
• 512MB (Generic) DDR400 RAM
• Leadtek WinFast PX6600GT Tdh 128MB PCI-E Graphics Card
• LG DVD Writer
• 80GB Western Digital SATA HDD

I had a number of problems, including the Blue Screen of Death ntfs.sys on nearly every single boot, and restarts ALL THE TIME, for example when I double-clicked on an installer or went to run a program, just *Bang* I'd be back waiting for BIOS.

So I took the SATA drive back (I was pretty sure that was the problem) and swapped it for an IDE 80GB Western Digital (I've heard very bad things about Western Digital hard drives but thought i'd try)

I have since installed the IDE drive and am having SIMILAR problems, sometimes XP home SP2 will ATTEMPT to boot, get to the screen with the word "Welcome" and *bang* restart. Also when I run 3D Mark 2001 I get the Error : "File\data\gs2\LWO\TEXTURES\TOWNREFL_NEAR.DDS is corrupted"

This is the same error i got with the SATA drive. THEREFORE I am assuming it's not the HDD.

ANY IDEAS?? RAM? CPU? Graphics?

Any help or ideas would be much appreiciated, Thanks.

 

[Rik]

Google and get memtest and test your rma with at leas a half dozen passes!!!!

What make and wattage psu have you got???

 

[N3051M]

Few questions if i may...

Does Safe Mode work stable?
are you just swapping the HDD from your old setup and installing it to your new rig?
Or is this a fresh install onto the HDD from a winxp cd?
did you assemble this rig by yourself or is this built by someone/OEM prebuild?
Open up the case and post whatever it says on the PSU Info sticker here.
Download Speedfan. Post a reading of what it says (temps, voltages)

 

[scotty23]

It's an "XSonic" 450watt PSU

Also i've encountered another problem, when I'm playing a game for a while the sound will freeze, then my computer goes *click* and restarts!!

This is so incredibly frustrating!!!!! lol

 

[scotty23]

It's a brand new Hard Drive (Got it out of the box yesterday)

I partitioned, did full format and installed a clean copy of windows XP Home SP2

I've now tried XP Pro as well and had the same problems

I assembled it by myself, but i've assembled at least 10 (for friends, family etc) in the last few months and none of them have behaved badly like this one! I'm definitely not saying i'm a pro but they normally work for me lol

PSU INFO STICKER says:

• Pentium IV ATX switching Power Supply
• MODEL: SZ-450WP4
• AC input: 220/110VAC 50/60HZ 2.5/5A
• FUSE RATING: F6.3A 250VAC
• DC output max +3.3v = 25A +5v = 36A +12v = 15A -5V = 0.5A -12v = 0.5A +5VSB = 2.5A
• 450W

SPEEDFAN SAYS:

VCOREA: 1.41V -12V: 1.71V
VCOREB: 1.52V -5V: 2.49V
+3.3V: 3.36V +5VSB 5.75V
+5V: 5.16V VBAT 3.20V
+12V: 12.22V

Temp1: 33C Fan1: 3125 RPM
Temp2: 34C
Temp3: 29C
Local Temp: 31C
Remote Temp: 37C
HD0: 36C
Temp1: 39C
Core 27C


DIMM INFO:

Scanning SMBus at $1C00...
Decoding DIMM #0
Memory type is DDR
Module Rows : 2
Levels : 2.5V
Parity : NO PARITY
Refresh Rate : 7.8us
Total Size : 512MB
Scanning SMBus at $1C40...
Scanning SMBus at $3D403E3F...
Scanning SMBus at $3D403637...
Scanning SMBus at $3D405051...


I'll post the MEMTEST results soon

Umm let me know if you need anything else!

Thanks heaps for your help guys!!! i'll check back soon.

 

[scotty23]

GRRRR

I just went to install NERO to burn MEMTEST to CD and it went *click* but a blue screen of death this time, not a restart. I swore so loudly that it woke my girlfriend up, now it crashes every time I run the installer.

It went something like this::

A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage

***STOP: 0x00000024 (0x001902FE, 0xBA71F7D0, 0xBA71F4CC, 0xF72A0470)
*** Ntfs.sys - Address f72A0470 base at F7269000, Datestamp 41107eea

This machine is really upsetting me GRRRRR

lol

 

[Rik]

And your girlfriend too!!!! Do you have any other ram you could try in it????

 

[scotty23]

Nope I don't have any more DDR ram to try... I'll try putting the RAM in a different slot or something.

Oh yeah, SAFE MODE seems to work fine also

 

[Rik]

Boot into safe mode and run error checking on your hard drive!!!!

 

[scotty23]

I ran 2 different APPS, one was from wester digital themselves and no problems at all on the HDD

 

[Tmagic650]

Power Supply?

 

[sw123]

Could also be bad SATA controllers on the motherboard as well...try using a PCI SATA controller, see if it works differently.

 

[N3051M]

I think its time for you to build this outside the box, on a non-conductive surface with the minimum setup. Look for any signs of damage eg popped capacitors, burns, smells etc.

If you can get your ram tested (maybe use another pc to burn the memtest cd) then that would tell you if you got problems originating from there.. otherwise if you can get your hands on another stick of ram it could work..

try using different data cables to/from the hdd and mobo?

If safe mode works then its gotta be software related or driver related..
-look for any ? in device manager
-look in start>run eventvwr and see if you got any errors listed there
-update the drivers especialy for your motherboard chipset
-open c:\windows\minidump folder and post any new recent ones here

 

[Samstoned]

PSU does not sound strong enough
as stated get that system some fresh air
remove all none needed hardware
got more'n one stick of memory remove one
make sure the video card has the power cable connected if it needs extra power
check heatsink on both the cpu and video
this sounds like a power issue or a over heated piece of hardware
if it's something overheated it could be scrape now
be careful how many times you let the machine reboot in given short period of time