Bad PIII 1Ghz processor causes registry and *.vxd errors???

[John P]

Started having problems on my kids machine Friday night:

Abit BH6 mb with latest BIOS
PIII 1Ghz processor
Geforce2 GTS-V
WIN98SE

(Machine still works great for the games they play; Jedi Knight II, Mechwarrior IV, etc...)

Anyway, Friday night I installed Jedi Academy and started having problems. Then the machine would not boot up. It kept getting stuck at the blue registry checker screen. Sometimes it would boot into safe mode but then I would get *.vxd errors, BSOD's, etc... Tried a new hard drive and fresh installation of WIN98 but it would lock up after some error screeen at the beginning of the installation.

To make a long story short, I troublehot the hardware by testing the hard drive in another hulk I had laying around (another Abit BH6 with a Celery566@850) and everything worked fine. I then transferred everything else into the new rig exept the processor and all worked fine. However, when I transferred the PIII 1Ghz over I got the same lockups at boot. Weird stuff??!!

Anyone seen this problem before? Could I have a voltage set incorrect or something or is the processor toast? The PIII has been working fine for about a year. Suppose I could get it replaced under warranty?

 

[John P]

OK, just one bump.

Searching google it appears that this, indeed, could be signs of a bad processor. Just looking for anyone with a similar experience to concur. I will do some additional testing to make sure.

Dang thing is OEM so it looks like I am most likely out $90 for a 10 month old processor.....

 

[oldfart]

Which PIII 1G? 100 or 133 FSB? What rev BH6?

 

[fkloster]

slot 1 or socket?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Originally posted by: oldfart
Which PIII 1G? 100 or 133 FSB? What rev BH6?

good question, if the 1 GHz is 133 FSB it could be a memory issue (memory is OK at 100, failing at 133).

 

[Trader05]

I had a P3 1ghz 133 in my old BX6R2, i was getting those types of errors, found out it was my memory, i had one cheap stick of 133 that couldn't handle the 133 bus.

 

[imported_Phil]

Yeah, this smacks heavily of memory problems. Go get memtest86 (Google for it), and run a few loops to see what's going on there. A bad processor will cause things like lockups or not booting, unlikely to cause .vxd and registry errors; that's more than work of bad RAM.

Let us know how it goes!

 

[John P]

It's a slot 1 100mhz FSB, I think it's a Rev 1.0 BH6.

I have not tested the memory with Memtest, but I did try the PIII with several different sticks of memory to no avail. As soon as I stick in a different processor everything works fine. So I am leaving kid number 2's machine running with the Celery 850 for now and not messing with it.

I also tried using a different OS with the PIII, I upgraded my other kid's (kid number 1) machine but left his BH6 machine intact (the one I took the Celery 850 out of). So, I tried booting to that hard drive with the PIII and as soon as it got into Win XP it gave me a BSOD and then shut down. With the same RAM in I tried a trusty old Celery 300A OC to 450 and it booted into windows just fine. So, I am fairly certain that the PIII is bad.

On a side note, since this spare machine has Win XP on it it wants me to activate it since I changed some hardware - so I can't do any more troubleshooting with that hard drive - it is the same copy of Win XP that is on my kids new machine, GRRRRRRR!! I hate Microsoft!!

I did find and order a couple of Celery 1.1's FCPGAs from Computer Geeks ($38 each), that will extend the life of these BH6's for a bit (I already have 2 slotkets). Now if I could find some dirt cheap Geforce 3's