Not sure where the problem is...

[buckbadly]

OK, here goes. My second rig is giving me fits..big time. I'm gonna put a small sig at the bottom of the post to fill ya in on components. I'm running raid 0 with 2-20 gig maxtors, nothin fancy, just 7500 rpm plain ol' maxtors. And have a 6 gig partition that has the OS only on it. Heres where the problem part comes in. I have done a complete format and fresh install. The pc has bare minimum programs running after install. I dont have any conflicts or problems in the device manager. Now last night my wife and I were playing pool on yahoo for almost an hour with absolutely no problems. Her on my main rig and me on the one I speak of. So I figured everything was alright, I installed freelancer for my son to play and he set there and played for little over an hour, then he paused the game and came back and the pc had locked up. It happens with any games, not just that one by the way. This is what its been doing. I'm getting constant freeze ups, occasional bsod's, sometimes I reset and it says system disk cannot be found blah blah. He may be playing a game and it just goes to the desktop with no errors or anything at all. Hardware monitor syas its running cool and all volt reading seem stable and fine. I used the ram, vid card PSU and HD's in my main pc prior to doing a recent overhaul and had no problems at all. Where do you think the problem exists, any suggestions? I'm gonna take it out of raid array and try single hd's to see if that fixes the problem. It may run fine for a day, then act up, or it may act up after a couple hours????
Iwill Xp333r mobo
AMD 1700XP-default for now
2 maxtor 20g 7500's in raid0
1 maxtor 40g for storage
Sapphire Radeon 9500np
Powmax 450W PSU
cd-rw and dvd rom
Geil PC3200 512-default for now

Thanks for any ideas guys, and I'm sorry for the long post, I figured as much info as possible would help with diagnosing purposes.

 

[JimmyG]

The raid array probably isn't doing much for you. Try running on one maxtor. If the problem remains try the other one. Also, check your temps. Since it is your second computer, it may have accumulated a lot of dust and be overheating.

 

[buckbadly]

Thanks jimmy...thats what I was thinking. Trying single HD's. I'm guessin one of the drives is prolly taking a crap on me. I just put it back together so its fairly clean yet. I'm gonna blow mine out so I'll do this one while I'm at it anyways. Thanks for the suggestions

 

[buckbadly]

Well I'm runnin one single 40g now. Still gettin interminten(sp?) reboots and freezes. Not gettin a BSOD though. Just restarts on its own. I thought maybe ps but its new. Could the problem be in the mobo somewhere?

 

[Outlaw Wizard]

try slowing the computer down to standard and see if you still get the random restarts . you may be haveing a memory error or a cpu error overclock .

 

[buckbadly]

k, I'll try that and let it run for a while then post back.

 

[JimmyG]

Also, if you have more than one stick of RAM try running with just one if problem doesn't go away, switch to the other stick. Also, try removing all hardware except one stick of ram, one hard drive, and video card. Set everything to default in bios. Reinstall windows. See if it runs.

 

[buckbadly]

This is funny...listen to this.
The day I uninstalled the raid array and installed the single 40 gig drive, it was raining and lightning..it gets better I wasn't actually using the pc, my 13 year old was...and our house is really suseptible to brief power flickers when its lightning out. Anyways..what was goin on was the power would flicker and restart the puter...so my son would come runnin and say "You didn't fix it agin dad...it's still doin it" I'v been keepin an eye on it now for a few days and it seems ok now...so one of the 20 gig drives I was using on the raid array is bad. Just have to pinpoint which one. True story