a7a266 problems?

[kewk]

Just ran into a problem. Strange thing is it just started happening. I have been running this mobo fine for many months. Will try to describe everything is best as possible.

Hardware:
T-Bird 1.4
Asus a7a266 1009 bios update
Geforce 3: 12.41 Det. drivers
sblive 5.1
Netgear FA310 TX 10/100 NIC
60gb Maxtor 7400

My problem is this:

First when ever I try to install Live Wire 3.0 everything seems fine. It will ask me to reboot and I do. Upon rebooting it will ask me where the drivers are for Creative Multimedia Interface. I point it to the cd (tried every folder) and says it cant find any drivers. This is the same with the downloaded drivers (sblw9xup.exe).

Second when I try to install DX8.1 everything goes fine. I will reboot and when I get back to windows it tells me that registry has found a problem and will reboot to load a previous registry file. SO I reboot goes to dos and loads the very first reg backup which is that of a fresh install.

However the last attempt to install DX8.1 crashed before it was about to ask to reboot. The crash was rundll. I reboot and everything was fine. Got into windows no attempt to restore the reg because I disabled scanreg. Now when I run dxdiag everything seems fine. When I test DirectDraw in dxdiag it goes fine. But when I test Direct3D I get this error (Direct3D test results: Failure at step 29 (DrawIndexPrimitive): HRESULT = 0x8007000e (Out of memory))

Now obviously the error is directly connected to the failed DX8.1 install. What I need to find out is why and/or how do I fix this computer.

Further information:

When I run dxdiag and get the errors everything will start to crash. If I run IE, it will crash with a dll error. I close the window and it will crash with a different (MSHTML.DLL and Kernel32.dll are a couple) dll error. Each time the window was opened a different dll would crash. I kept launching the windows to see what happened and I crashed to a black window with small green bars at the top of the screen.

Above is what is happening as of now. The problem started sooner.

I was playing a game and crashed. Got a ddraw error. So I reboot and tried to launch the game. Each dll that it would try to load (don't remember exact wording) it would crash every dll that the game was trying to load. The error was something like *.dll is not a valid windows image file. I reboot and tried to install anti virus thinking it may be a virus. But it would crash trying to install. So I downloaded a CIH95 cleaner thinking maybe it was that. Ran it and found nothing.

Thinking that it "might" be my hard drive (IBM Deskstar 60GXP) I went out and bought my Maxtor mentioned above.

Now I am stuck. I flashed the bios thinking that if it was some type of bios virus it might kill it. But no luck. Next on my list was to buy a new mobo. Dunno.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.



Posted in the wrong forum and got this reply.
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Note that this forum is NOT for troubleshooting.

But I'll help you anyway.

If you have more than 1 DDR DIMM, please read the FAQ: I can't run my ASUS A7A266 with 2 DDR DIMMs.

If you suspect that you have problems with your hard drive, please read the FAQ: IBM hard drive problems, and how do I get an RMA?. Although this article is written for the 75GXP, it also applies to the 60GXP.

Try those, then post back in one of the other forum categories.
=================================================

I am using 1 stick of sdram. Corsair pc133 cas2 (inferon) 512mb.
I also tried a stick of 128 corsair.
I bought a new hard drive. Maxtor 7400 60gb and have the same problem.

 

[AndyHui]

Welcome to the forums. Sorry about the other post, but the Highly Technical Forum does not deal with troubleshooting (as explained in the first post in HTF), so your thread would be locked soon by the mods. I'll try to give you what help I can.

This definitely seems like a hardware problem rather than a software problem.

For the ALi Magik1 chipset, you only need to install the AGP driver. No other chipset specific drivers are needed.

Have you tried doing a clean full reinstall? If that did not fix the problem, it is almost certainly a hardware problem. Do you have sufficient cooling for your processor? Is your power supply large enough? Have you tried to see if the system is stable without the network card and the sound card?

It is unlikely that you have a virus, from your description, but you may want to try PC-Cillin's House Call, which is an online virus scanner and does not need you to install anything.

 

[kewk]

Thanks for your help.

I will try the ALi agp drivers, as I haven?t installed them.

I have formatted and repartitioned several of times.

My processor did have one problem but I believe it happened after this started happening. My fan went out and I could smell my processor over heating. I turned off my machine and went to fry's for a new heatsink/fan.

I did take all hardware out except video card and same problem. I replaced the geforce 3 with a GeForce ddr and same problem.

I am going to go to frys after work and buy a new mobo and DDR ram. Was thinking about a soyo dragon +. That or if I can find a a7v266-e but I don?t think fry's sells asus and also I have always had problems with via boards :\ via boards are what drove me to this ali board.

 

[AndyHui]

If you can smell overheating due to fan failure, it looks like your CPU is damaged. Can you borrow another one to confirm? If this new CPU does not continuously cause errors, you will need to purchase a new processor.