Eelskraps
01-15-2008, 04:04 PM
Ok forgive me if this is too long but I want to see if I am on the right track here so I want to give enough background info.
My system as originally configured
M2N-SLI Deluxe Mobo
AMD X2 4200
2 MEG Patriot Dual channel Ram
XFX 7600GT Vid card
X-FI Xtremegamer soundcard
Windows XP Pro 32Bit
Raidmax Smilodon Case
My system had been doing well for the past year but whenever I played one particular Game, (Dark Age of Camelot, a MMORPG) I would suffer random reboots. Sometimes windows would come back with an error and sometimes not. When it did, it came back with an unknown driver error. Of course I uninstalled and re-installed all of my drivers and the problem still occurred but since it was only once every couple days I just kind of dealt with it and ignored it, figured I would get it whenever I re-wiped the system for a fresh install (which I do about every 3 months or so). Well for Christmas my wife wanted to upgrade our PCs, so I built her a new rig (we take turns on who gets the new one lol) and just upgraded mine some. I added the following parts
AMD X2 6000
4 MEG Corsair DDR2 800 memory (Yah, I know, I don’t get all of it with XP 32 but I am planning on upping to XP64, long story)
XFX 7950 Vid Card (It was cheap and pretty good according to Tom’s since this machine will never see Vista)
ANTEC 900 Case
My trouble started when I attempted to upgrade my bios (it would not recognize the 6000 with the version I had). The chip would flash the ROM, hang at 87%, jump to 100% and then fail to validate. I searched ASUS boards and found other instances of this happening. Some people got around it by flashing in BIOS instead of windows, others ended up with a dead mobo. I decided to try it in BIOS utility and found that somehow it did actually update even though the windows updated said NG. So thinking positive I decided to keep going and see what happened.
Things were proceeding well for a week until one day I attempted to boot up and heard a clicking noise coming from inside, one of my wires had slipped into a fan! Oops! I knew windows was booting but I quickly hit the power button to keep from tearing anything up. I figured I would get the hateful windows did not boot up correctly error and go on. Imagine my surprise when I did boot back up and got a message saying could not boot because CONFIG.SYS was corrupted/missing. At this point I’m pretty pissed but since the system was a fresh install and I still had all my backups I just decided to re-install and not mess with repairing, thinking I screwed myself with the rapid fire power button somehow.
So back to the work bench and my XP disks. While attempting to install XP my system would lock up right before it asked you to install or repair etc, sometimes it would not lock up, it would actually give a blue screen saying driver problem. This really concerned me since I couldn’t even install from disk. So I rolled up my sleeves and began to do a plain boot, CPU, Vid, 1 Stick Mem, etc. What I found out was that the only way to get my machine to get past the install point is to move my memory from one set of slots to another. I tried both sticks in all four slots and either stick in the first slot would cause the BSOD or freeze. Any other combination worked ok. (FYI- At this point I tried a brand new Hard drive, my old vid card, and still got the same result)
So now I was nervous but moved my mem sticks to the other set of slots and continued. Everything installed ok, I updated windows, all drivers, installed my programs and was a happy but puzzled camper. After several hours of this I installed a fresh copy of my favorite game (DAOC) and started to play. After about 10 mins guess what, REBOOT!!!! I came back in game and same thing, reboot. I checked this morning and seemed ok but video was kinda glitchy.
Tonight I’m going to move the vid card to the other PCI x16 slot and check result but I’m really just starting to think that my mobo is having problems since that’s pretty much the only common thing. Anyone else have any ideas before I get mad and chuck the thing out the window =D
Thanks!
(BTW- Yes my copy of XP is my legally purchased copy, I don’t believe in theft of any kind, including software)
My system as originally configured
M2N-SLI Deluxe Mobo
AMD X2 4200
2 MEG Patriot Dual channel Ram
XFX 7600GT Vid card
X-FI Xtremegamer soundcard
Windows XP Pro 32Bit
Raidmax Smilodon Case
My system had been doing well for the past year but whenever I played one particular Game, (Dark Age of Camelot, a MMORPG) I would suffer random reboots. Sometimes windows would come back with an error and sometimes not. When it did, it came back with an unknown driver error. Of course I uninstalled and re-installed all of my drivers and the problem still occurred but since it was only once every couple days I just kind of dealt with it and ignored it, figured I would get it whenever I re-wiped the system for a fresh install (which I do about every 3 months or so). Well for Christmas my wife wanted to upgrade our PCs, so I built her a new rig (we take turns on who gets the new one lol) and just upgraded mine some. I added the following parts
AMD X2 6000
4 MEG Corsair DDR2 800 memory (Yah, I know, I don’t get all of it with XP 32 but I am planning on upping to XP64, long story)
XFX 7950 Vid Card (It was cheap and pretty good according to Tom’s since this machine will never see Vista)
ANTEC 900 Case
My trouble started when I attempted to upgrade my bios (it would not recognize the 6000 with the version I had). The chip would flash the ROM, hang at 87%, jump to 100% and then fail to validate. I searched ASUS boards and found other instances of this happening. Some people got around it by flashing in BIOS instead of windows, others ended up with a dead mobo. I decided to try it in BIOS utility and found that somehow it did actually update even though the windows updated said NG. So thinking positive I decided to keep going and see what happened.
Things were proceeding well for a week until one day I attempted to boot up and heard a clicking noise coming from inside, one of my wires had slipped into a fan! Oops! I knew windows was booting but I quickly hit the power button to keep from tearing anything up. I figured I would get the hateful windows did not boot up correctly error and go on. Imagine my surprise when I did boot back up and got a message saying could not boot because CONFIG.SYS was corrupted/missing. At this point I’m pretty pissed but since the system was a fresh install and I still had all my backups I just decided to re-install and not mess with repairing, thinking I screwed myself with the rapid fire power button somehow.
So back to the work bench and my XP disks. While attempting to install XP my system would lock up right before it asked you to install or repair etc, sometimes it would not lock up, it would actually give a blue screen saying driver problem. This really concerned me since I couldn’t even install from disk. So I rolled up my sleeves and began to do a plain boot, CPU, Vid, 1 Stick Mem, etc. What I found out was that the only way to get my machine to get past the install point is to move my memory from one set of slots to another. I tried both sticks in all four slots and either stick in the first slot would cause the BSOD or freeze. Any other combination worked ok. (FYI- At this point I tried a brand new Hard drive, my old vid card, and still got the same result)
So now I was nervous but moved my mem sticks to the other set of slots and continued. Everything installed ok, I updated windows, all drivers, installed my programs and was a happy but puzzled camper. After several hours of this I installed a fresh copy of my favorite game (DAOC) and started to play. After about 10 mins guess what, REBOOT!!!! I came back in game and same thing, reboot. I checked this morning and seemed ok but video was kinda glitchy.
Tonight I’m going to move the vid card to the other PCI x16 slot and check result but I’m really just starting to think that my mobo is having problems since that’s pretty much the only common thing. Anyone else have any ideas before I get mad and chuck the thing out the window =D
Thanks!
(BTW- Yes my copy of XP is my legally purchased copy, I don’t believe in theft of any kind, including software)