Upgraded Xeon = WEIRD problems!

[Graphicism]

I'm not sure where to post this to get the best results, but here goes...

I've been experiencing some really odd problems after I upgraded my ram and hard drive yesterday evening. I setup a WD Raptor as my OS and cache drive, and went from value 2x512 to tight 2x1gb.

Let me start by running through what I did...

I moved my original hard drive (seagate) over to sata 2 (slave) and put the new hard drive (raptor) into it's place in sata 1 (master). I set it to boot from CD and put the Windows XP SP2 disc in the drive, booted it up fine, detected both the ram in 1&3 dual channel and the raptor in sata 1. The windows CD booted up and I used that to partition the raptor, to it's maximum capacity. After that completed windows installed fine, and restarted.

The raptor booted up windows, so I started to install my software. After 30 mins of this I find out that the raptor is not drive C:/, it is infact drive G:/ - I must of missed that when partitioning it, I also am not sure if I installed those programs on drive C:/ which was the original seagate drive. The reason I notice this is because things started to go weird, the start menu paused when I hovered over it, graphic artifacts apeared all over, the mouse locked up, the screen when back, and then it came back on seconds later all apeared to be back to normal... so I figured the 2 OSes are causing a conflict.

I shut down, took out the seagate and just booted up with the raptor, it crashed 3 times on loading windows, but 4th time it loaded fine? I figured I needed to get on the internet to find out about my problems so I shut down again, take the raptor out, and put just the seagate it. I get the same 3 crash problems and 4th it loads, now it seems both OSes are corrupt.

I shut down yet again, take out the seagate, put the raptor in, boot from windows CD, format and partition the raptor again, this time to drive C:/ as it's the only one in the computer. Procede to install windows on it again and half way through 'transfering files' it brings up an error, so I restart yet again.
Tried again with the install and it got past that part and onto the actual installation, half way into this it tells me D:/386 cannot be found on the Windows CD, and asks me if I want to skip it, I tried not skipping but it wouldn't work, so I continued without it, it poped up a few more times during the install saying that dir didn't exist. - Clearly though it installed right the first time with no errors, why is it giving me all these this time around?

So anyway I finish up the install, boot up windows successfully, and start to install drivers such as the graphic card. Once installed I restart, loads up fine, all looks pretty, and shortly after it locks up yet again, screen goes black, and then comes back on, which black artifacts in the windows I had opened, this seems to happen when I tried doing opening multiple dirs at once.

I am now currently in this state, it keeps happening on and off, and the long pauses with the hard drive are telling me something is wrong with the raptor. The artifacts are telling me something is wrong with the gfx card, and the crashed tell me somethings wrong with the windows installation. I'm pretty much at a loss, this must all be connected, but what too? Easy answer would be the OS installation, but why would that install correctly the first time, but not the second time around?

Any help or experience is much appreciated

- Dan

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

I was gonna say that 3 crashes before you reach the desktop then the 4th time, able to reach the desktop and the OS saying that the file or directory can't be found can be sign of unstable RAM. That's if the HDD's fine.

But, it sounds more like the HDD, because you noticed a pause, which is a emergency warning sign of a HDD problem, probably bad sectors.

 

[Graphicism]

RJARRRPCGP-

Yes I thought ram too, but I run SuperPI and it completed fine, although a couple seconds slower than my previous ram, hopefully thats only because it's larger capacity?

Hard drive works fine... when it works, the pauses are weird though, it's like it's stopping the for the other hard drive? They should be able to run at the same time.

 

[diehrd]

DO a lowlevel format on the raptor..KEEP THE SEAGATE out of system.

Install th eO/S on the raptor after the low level format..The problem you are having is most likely duplicate boot files are on both driveas and the MBR is having a problem.Thats why i am suggesting cleaning the raptor with a low level format.

Now I am not sure why but I have seen Sata drives when ya have more then 1 installed cause O/S problems because the O/S puts files for boot up on both disks.

So clean the raptor completly and load the o/s and drivers with it being a stand alone drive.

 

[Graphicism]

diehrd -

The second and last time I installed windows I had the seagate out of the system the entire time. I am not sure I did a 'lowlevel' format, not sure what that is, but I formatted the drive with the 'quick' feature. I then partitioned the maximum size again, this time as C and installed windows.

Do I need to format again with low level?

Also, how do I get rid of windows XP the correct way, I tried to unstall it from the other drive with osuninst.exe but it didn't work.

 

[diehrd]

Western Digital has a utility that will do a lowlevel format..I also beleive there is a dos command to format the master boot record format C:/ MBR maybe i forget lol.

But for sure a low level format will write zeros to the entire drive even the mbr area.

 

[Graphicism]

Thank you that seems like what I will have to end up doing.

I looked on the WD web site and found out about the low level format, and the WD program for that, however it states 'should be used with any Western Digital EIDE hard drive that is 80 GB in capacity or larger.' also the Raptor is not on the list that follows for the download?

 

[Graphicism]

I can't catch the lockups or crashes, but I managed to catch an artifact:

http://www.loadingdeck.com/error-1.jpg

 

[LutaWicasa]

Thank you that seems like what I will have to end up doing.

I looked on the WD web site and found out about the low level format, and the WD program for that, however it states 'should be used with any Western Digital EIDE hard drive that is 80 GB in capacity or larger.' also the Raptor is not on the list that follows for the download?

Is this what you d/led?

 

[Graphicism]

Thank you, thats what I couldn't find.

- I run the recovery console in dos, typed in chkdsk - windows said there didn't apear to be an error. So I then ran chkdsk /p and it said there were multiple errors detected. I then typed in fixmbr, that completed in seconds, run chkdsk /p again and no errors this time! I restarted and windows booted very quickly, with any luck it might of just been my MBR? I will have a play around and see if the problems continue, will check back shortly.

 

[Graphicism]

Well now I've come to the conclusion its the RAM. I've tried 1 stick at a time, 1 stick makes it crash upon loading, the other won't complete superPI "not exact in round" - looks like I'll have to RMA it, likely get the same again unless anyone has a better idea.

 

[perfectturmoil]

Well now I've come to the conclusion its the RAM. I've tried 1 stick at a time, 1 stick makes it crash upon loading, the other won't complete superPI "not exact in round" - looks like I'll have to RMA it, likely get the same again unless anyone has a better idea.

Does your mobo have a volt mod for the ram? Or are you running at stock? Low voltage can do tricky things - it might just be the case that your mobo delivered enough for the value ram to get by, but not enough for the good stuff..

Funny thing is, mine was backwards.. When I had 2x512mb PC3200 Corsair Value Select, it was ALL messed up at 200fsb.. couldn't do a warm reboot.. couldn't PROPERLY save things in the bios.. got to windows at 165 and ran fine...

My G.Skill PC4400 (or whatever is rated to 275) worked perfectly fine at what ended up being a delivered voltage of 2.45ish.. which is VERY low for PC3200. So... Are you volt modded? That could have been the cause of all your problems - the reinstall with underspec'd ram kept causing errors in the install / mbr..

[EDIT] RMA might be a way to go.. although its probably not.. Thing is, the ram you have probably isnt "faulty".. it probably performs perfectly fine at spec.. just not undervolted.. Same as how its not a good idea to RMA a processor that doesn't overclock as well as you wanted, it might not be a good idea to RMA ram that doesn't undervolt as you would like..

Especially when a voltmod should easily do the trick :- ]

 

[diehrd]

Well now I've come to the conclusion its the RAM. I've tried 1 stick at a time, 1 stick makes it crash upon loading, the other won't complete superPI "not exact in round" - looks like I'll have to RMA it, likely get the same again unless anyone has a better idea.

Do you have the ram voltage modded ?

Also shame on me for not reading a bit closer ..Your sig shows a 380 Antec PSU you may run with it but I would be a bit worried power fluctuations and low lines would result with that psu..

 

[DaveB]

From the G-Skill website, PC3200 ZX requires 2.6V to 2.75V. Unless you have a VDIMM mod, the VBIMM will be under 2.5V. So if you haven't done a VDIMM, there's no point in RMA'ing the RAM.

 

[diehrd]

From the G-Skill website, PC3200 ZX requires 2.6V to 2.75V. Unless you have a VDIMM mod, the VBIMM will be under 2.5V. So if you haven't done a VDIMM, there's no point in RMA'ing the RAM.

DAVE hits the nail on the head ! !

I use G-Skill and the best Voltage I have found is 2.7 at 315 FSB..I realize you are not going that high but even at stock the minimum voltage should be used to be 100% sure you have faulty ram .

 

[petteyg359]

That "artifact" doesn't look much like a gfx card porblem to me... it looks like Windows is just loading the wrong image there, which could mean some file pointer on the drive, which Windows thinks is one image, is in fact a different image. That "artifact" just looks like it's a CD-ROM icon where it should be a blue tile.

 

[Graphicism]

Update -

I did the low-level format, went through the entire install and the same problems started. So I took out the RAM, and stuck in the old sticks, did the low level again, installed windows, no errors! (yay) and so far so good.

My conclusion was going to be that the ram is bad, however as DaveB so rightly pointed it's higher voltage RAM than my mobo was allowing for... I had completely forgot about that, since I did the Uwire mod over a year ago. Now I'm either going to attempt the VDIMM mod, or I will send the RAM back as a return, and pick up another 2 sticks of the 512 value ram.

Thanks for the help guys!

- Dan

 

[perfectturmoil]

Another two sticks of the value ram might give you problems too. IF you happen to be right on the border between stable and unstable, adding two more sticks to draw MIGHT throw things off. On the same hand, however, they might work perfectly.

Either way, good luck!


[EDIT] BTW: ValueRam is that way because they take whatever is cheapest at the time - Two sticks of the same value ram can be made from quite different components. So, you may run into the same problem EVEN if you "have" enough voltage with 4 sticks..

When I had some corsair value ram in my PC-DL, one stick worked perfectly fine - the other would not at all.. They were out of the same package.

 

[Graphicism]

perfectturmoil -

You might be right, however if they promise to run at 2.5V that's all they should use. If you are referring to the board not being able to put out enough for the 2 that might be the case, I'm not sure how that works.

I've been thinking and I'll probebly just keep what I have in there for now, I'm looking to try out an Opteron duallie so I'll be selling the xeon shortly.

 

[perfectturmoil]

I've been thinking and I'll probebly just keep what I have in there for now, I'm looking to try out an Opteron duallie so I'll be selling the xeon shortly.

Hehe.. that was exactly the route I took ;- ]

My PC-DL only delivered around 2.45 volts to the ram (as reported by MBM5). Thats due to the droopyness of the PC-DL. So. Even IF the ram is rated for 2.5 volts, it STILL may not work.. as I'm sure you know, some of this stuff can be luck of the draw..

If you want to upgrade, I'd keep your good ram and try the volt mod (if you are worried, find someone you know who can do it - got any friends going to engineering school? If THEY can't, they know someone who can!) That way, when you DO sell it, you might find a buyer who is to nervous to do the mod themselves, but still want the potential overclock boost :- ]