Noob needs help!

[Speeddemon3]

Hello All!

I have made this site a must read for quite some time, and now that the tinkering bug has finally bit I feel confident any issues I face can be solved here. I'm not much of a gamer or hardcore technology enthusiast but my interest is beyond the normal PC owner and I've begun building and tuning some older systems to start with. At least if I set my system into an accidental "suicide mode" messing around I'll save a few hundred bucks. So with that being said I have a rather unusual issue..

A couple of months ago a friend gave me a system that he had become frustrated with and shelved after he upgraded, he had what he called a ghost in the machine. He could use the system without any problems for weeks or months but without warning it would start scrambling info, run slow, refuse to shutdown etc. It is the current system I'm using now.

Equipment - Asus A7N8X-X mobo, AMD XP 1900, 2 x 1GB DDR 400Hz, Radeon 4650 XFX, Creative X-fi SC. OS - Win XP sp3. The system doesn't run that bad considering it seems all of the parameters are set to their lowest default settings and I can run some games and download simultaneously w/o problems, but here is where the fun begins.

Shutdown is unreliable and I get the terrifying BSOD with a pci-sys address blah blah error. I did some research and found this mobo is single channel only and it did have a 512mb stick in the 3rd DIMM socket which has been removed. Oddly enough the BSOD disappeared but returned a day later. After more research on CPU freq, FSB and MEM timing I looked into the BIOS but never found anything that stuck out as a culprit, (not like I'd know anyway). But in perusing this site I found an endorsement for the CPU-Z program and thought what the hell.

I ran the program and the result was..well interesting. On the SPD tab it lists both of my 1GB DRAM sticks to a full value of 2048mb..ok. But when checking slot 1 and 2 there is a difference and with my limited knowledge I don't know if this is a Eureka!! moment I should feel good about or another red herring catch. DIMM 1 does NOT give me a value of 133mhz which is what the POST test and the BIOS tell me the system is locked at to run. I have only 166mhz and 200mhz under the JEDEC values. But DIMM 2 has the 133, 166, 200mhz values. I have been told my issues could be memory related and from what I'm looking at I'm translating this recent finding into DIMM 1 isn't working and won't until I adjust my BIOS to tell the mobo to run both DIMM channels at 166mhz and/or adjust my timing cycles.

I was also told I might need to re-flash my BIOS, but I do not have the floppy. Personally I would rather perform an appendectomy on a pissed off mountain lion! This BIOS flashing s**t sounds scary. So it would be greatly appreciated if someone could tell me if I'm reading this info correctly or should I keep looking.

Thanks guys!

 

[Conumdrum]

How old is the power supply? How are the temps?

You could have bad memory. We have a memory and AMD sub forum, you might look there. I suggest you run Memtest off a USB drive.

 

[wingman99]

Did you switch your boot order so it would boot off optical drive?

 

[azanimefan]

lets start from stage 1.

Have you done a reformat of your HD?
Have you the latest BIOS?

 

[Speeddemon3]

Thanks for the reply! My power supply is about 15 months old and the temps actually are quite low. I am rather paranoid about overheating anything and my towers are always clean.

I will certainly look into the forms and I'll try to run another test. I had tried Memtest recently but I was unable to build or create a bootable disc. I used both Imgburn before I used ISOburner and neither had worked. I will try the USB and see what happens!

 

[Speeddemon3]

Holy, I didn't expect this much help! I'll try and answer in order and forgive me if I wind up missing something obvious like a setting or missed a simple fix.

Wingman99, Thank you for assisting! My drives are configured Primary IDE- DVD/CD, slave none. Sec IDE - HD WD500, slave none. Only other exterior hook ups are the front USBs with HD sound and Mic.

Hello azanimefan, Thank you as well! The HD is a 500Gb WD BC drive with a fresh copy of Win XP SP3 installed the night before I received this system. So it is about 2 months old, and has all updates/patches installed.The Bios is the stock Rev 2.0, to my knowledge has not been flashed, and neither myself or the previous owner have the disk. I have never flashed BIOS and it's a bit out of my comfort zone.

The disk I tried to burn did indeed burn to disc, but somewhere between either building or creating an image something was off and all it did was burn the unzipped copies of the files, Memtest does indeed mention an image must be created first in order to burn so I'm sure I'm failing to set up the transfer correctly. I do know the burner works great.

I did attempt to isolate the problem physically last night with odd results.

I shutdown the system and dumped the capacitors with the on/off switch and pulled out the mem module out of slot 1 (this was the seemingly dead module with the 166 & 200Mhz values only). Restarted the system w/o any problem and the POST read the 2 module. When I got to the desktop I attempted to start the CPU-Z tester to see any changes and new info. As the progress bar hit "processor" the system froze completely. I shutdown again thinking gotcha, pulled the module and reinstalled the 1st 133, 166, 200Mhz module in, rebooted to desktop, restarted CPU-Z and boom froze again! At that point I left everything alone as I wanted it to remain running and left well enough alone.

Not sure if this is useful at all but last week I was tinkering and bumped the CPU freq up to 166Mgz from 133 left the mem freq on auto and it started misbooting, locking at the keyboard or mouse check after POST. It did eventually boot but was to unreliable to leave at 166. Again if this is like PC class 101 type do's and don'ts stuff, please keep laughter to a minimum!!

 

[azanimefan]

I'd update your BIOS first before you do anything else. those bios updates listed on the ASUS webpage seem to be related to your problem.

Just grab the latest one, 1010, grab the Awdflash BIOS update tool V8.24B "flash utility", and then the user manual off that webpage. You should be able to hammer out how to do it.

while you're there, you should download all the drivers on that section as well.

 

[Speeddemon3]

Thank you! I have been looking for that link for WEEKS! I'm registered with Asus and was chatting with a tech but he never mentioned the link and I couldn't find an appropriate match and I no nothing about which updates, BIOS versions will work with the hardware I have.

I did some poking around last night and found disturbing issues with the mobo. Not all of it's devices are loaded. A mobo resource including a PCI bus is missing drivers, the Nvidia nForce options are none functioning including PCI Management, 5 Nforce memory controllers, an interrupt controller, system board and the direct memory access controller. All list as non-functioning and say "No drivers installed" WTF?

Is that normal??

 

[azanimefan]

Thank you! I have been looking for that link for WEEKS! I'm registered with Asus and was chatting with a tech but he never mentioned the link and I couldn't find an appropriate match and I no nothing about which updates, BIOS versions will work with the hardware I have.

I did some poking around last night and found disturbing issues with the mobo. Not all of it's devices are loaded. A mobo resource including a PCI bus is missing drivers, the Nvidia nForce options are none functioning including PCI Management, 5 Nforce memory controllers, an interrupt controller, system board and the direct memory access controller. All list as non-functioning and say "No drivers installed" WTF?

Is that normal??

sounds like you're missing some chipset drivers on your computer. i'd get all the downloads from that site. update your bios. get windows running, then install the drivers. Let us know where you stand after that.

 

[Conumdrum]

Agreed on that. Mobo sistes have usually one or 5 files you can download and install to update old/missing drivers. When you installed the system did you DL/Install the files off the Mobo site or install the Mobo CD after installing basic Windows?

If not, AHA, a learning moment.

 

[mtdewcowboy]

Agreed on that. Mobo sistes have usually one or 5 files you can download and install to update old/missing drivers. When you installed the system did you DL/Install the files off the Mobo site or install the Mobo CD after installing basic Windows?

If not, AHA, a learning moment.

I think we have a winner ding, ding ding
I have seen this before, computer will run good then slow to a crawl, random BSOD's & sometimes even act like a virus.

 

[Speeddemon3]

Well I was running well and then BLAM! I have a serious problem now...I was online working well with my A7N8X_X and then bluescreen at shutdown. Then this morning no boot.. went to bootscreen and froze, big list of parameters ending with LBA 133, I got pissed and changed the mobo to my A7n8X pulled my 2 gb ram installed 3 512mb and refired the system and NOTHING!! The same friggin thing. What the hell is a missing NLDTA?? I searched using a friends computer and it tells me it's a severely corrupt windows OS. I can't even reload a new copy. It won't format or moves only to 40% and then the HD dies..WTF?! What the hell could cause this on 2 seperate offline systems with perfectly working HD's.

 

[azanimefan]

that looks like a ram failure...

i know i had bad ram work like that before. could be the old mb is finally kicking the bucket too. but first I would pull out all the ram... then try with one ram stick at a time. and see what happens.