I have an EPOX 8k-RAIPRO machine with Sempron 3200+ running on it while I am working on an older computer with XFX KT400ANB mounted with Athalon 2500+ CPU. The latter is a computer that I built my nephew about 2 years ago, but something strange happened that I had to work on it again.
Just to be clear, both systems are running AMD processors, all memory sticks are PC2700 (333MHz).
My nephew told me that the computer was not booting up correctly, and when it finally boots up, it takes for every to click and open anything, if at all. So when I looked at it, there were two harddrives in there: C: 40GB (IDE0, Master), E: 80GB (IDE1, Master) the two slaves are DVD player and DVDRW respectively.
Device manager shows that there is a Yellow triangle on E:, and so I took that it might be hardware failure. Took that drive out, reformatted the 40GB, and as it was chucking along to finish installing XP, and doing its first bootup, the windows logo came on, and BHAM! it went into a very rapid BSOD and rebooted.
I have tried several drives, and it did the same thing on that machine. So I went over to my computer, and put those drives in, and they booted up without a problem, and installed perfectly. So at that, I started stripping the KT400 down to bare necessity, and even swapped parts from my computer that is working without problems. At one point, the KT400 hung on a BSOD because of a Physical Memory Dump error, prompting that it is a bad stick of memory. I swapped out with the computer in my system, the "bad" memory works like a charm, and that problem goes away. But the rapid BSOD came back. At some point, NTLDR cannot be found, or they are showing up as new RAW harddrives even when they were loaded with something. The errors I am getting are constantly 0x0000008E and 7E, indicating bad memory sticks that some how still work in my computer.
At this point when the last BSOD happened, I have swapped out everything, except for the IDE cables, and computer case.
I loaded Windows 2000, and look and behold! The system came to life. No errors, no dumps, nothing. Everything booted fine, went on well, updated just fine. One month later, same problem came back.
At this point, I am at my wits ends. I choose to disbelieve that a computer case or IDE cable could be the problem, but weirder things have happened.
Any insight?
All help and insight appreciated, before I turn bald (yanking my hair out)!
Adam
Just to be clear, both systems are running AMD processors, all memory sticks are PC2700 (333MHz).
My nephew told me that the computer was not booting up correctly, and when it finally boots up, it takes for every to click and open anything, if at all. So when I looked at it, there were two harddrives in there: C: 40GB (IDE0, Master), E: 80GB (IDE1, Master) the two slaves are DVD player and DVDRW respectively.
Device manager shows that there is a Yellow triangle on E:, and so I took that it might be hardware failure. Took that drive out, reformatted the 40GB, and as it was chucking along to finish installing XP, and doing its first bootup, the windows logo came on, and BHAM! it went into a very rapid BSOD and rebooted.
I have tried several drives, and it did the same thing on that machine. So I went over to my computer, and put those drives in, and they booted up without a problem, and installed perfectly. So at that, I started stripping the KT400 down to bare necessity, and even swapped parts from my computer that is working without problems. At one point, the KT400 hung on a BSOD because of a Physical Memory Dump error, prompting that it is a bad stick of memory. I swapped out with the computer in my system, the "bad" memory works like a charm, and that problem goes away. But the rapid BSOD came back. At some point, NTLDR cannot be found, or they are showing up as new RAW harddrives even when they were loaded with something. The errors I am getting are constantly 0x0000008E and 7E, indicating bad memory sticks that some how still work in my computer.
At this point when the last BSOD happened, I have swapped out everything, except for the IDE cables, and computer case.
I loaded Windows 2000, and look and behold! The system came to life. No errors, no dumps, nothing. Everything booted fine, went on well, updated just fine. One month later, same problem came back.
At this point, I am at my wits ends. I choose to disbelieve that a computer case or IDE cable could be the problem, but weirder things have happened.
Any insight?
All help and insight appreciated, before I turn bald (yanking my hair out)!
Adam
