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Old WD Caviar 136AA cause of lock-ups on new system?

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DaveSauce

Member
Here's the deal.....I'm building a system for someone, and he wants essentially everything upgraded except for the hard drive.....it's a 13.6GB western digital.....he really doesnt need anything more than that, and it saves him $60 on the system....

now, I'm having problems......the computer is having strange lock ups. They seem random....the only time I can really say it locks up is when it's loading something. Either installing a program or right away when the services and start up items are loading.

The motherboard is a Leadtek K7NCR18G Pro.....it is an NF2 board with integrated everything. I just flashed the bios to latest revision and no luck......I also upgraded the NF2 drivers to newest version available from nVidia....no luck. They were previously on the factory drivers, I was having the same problem....

What I've essentially ruled it down to is either the hard drive, the memory, or the board.....I'm leaning more towards the HDD and memory. I had the memory in dual channel (using 2x crucial OEM 256mb PC2100 sticks), but I put it back into regular mode with no luck. The only thing I haven't tried is running a single stick at a time, to see if maybe the memory is bad.....I dunno tho, because I turned off the quick post (letting it do all the memory tests) and it turned out fine. that's the next thing I'm gonna try....

I'm trying to load up Norton Systemworks to see if there's a software problem, but the computer keeps freezing halfway through, heh.....

scandisk and chkdsk don't reveal any problems either.

I have to say this has me pretty stumped. I've been fooling around with it for quite a while and I havent been able to fix it.....

I am hoping that this board is telling me the DDR speed of the memory.....it keeps telling me 266 during post. My EPoX 8RDA+ tells me both FSB and DDR speed.....anyhow, I have tried the memory speed at AUTO and SPD, neither of them changed anything. I suppose the next thing to do is set the memory speed to 100% and see if it matches the FSB or goes to 266....

Oh yea, and I have no agp card in there, but doesn't AGP run at 66mhz? On the POST screen, it shows:

CPU/MEM/AGP/PCI......133/266/100/33

I tried manually setting AGP speed to 66mhz and it still reads 100 on the POST screen.

So, any ideas? I'm gonna try playing around with the memory a bit and I'll post back with what I find....

edit:

system specs:

AMD Tbred B 1700+ (bios temp says 30-35C)
Leadtek K7NCR18G Pro (nForce2, integrated lan, GPU, etc)
Crucal OEM 256mb CL2.5 PC2100 memory (2 sticks)
Western Digital Caviar 13.6GB hard drive
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (OEM)
 
wish I did......

but, I'm starting to think it might be the memory......I'm hoping anyway....much easier to get a new stick of memory than a new hard drive....especially with RMAs, heh.

btw, anyone have any memory testing programs that I could use? To find out for sure if there's a memory error?

I just tried with a single stick, things seemed OK.....i'm running on the other stick right now, no lock ups so far...

is it possible that the system doesn't like 512mb of memory?
 
I use MemTester 1.45a... or is it MemDoctor? Search around, you'll find it. It's freeware, but you need a 98SE bootdisk to run it from DOS.
 
hrm, running a program called Memtest-86 v3.0 .......it says the amount of L2 cache is unknown.....I'm not sure if this is common for this program or not.....

edit:

well, I just ran memtest....it made a complete pass without finding any errors.

Is there a possibility that this system won't accept 512mb of ram? It worked just fine with a single stick.....when I ran with 2 sticks in any 2 slots I would get errors......and as I said, the memtest hasn't found anything yet.

any ideas?>
 
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