Bluescreens, file corruption, among other things.

[Sheepathon]

My friend just sent me a message telling me his system was going haywire. I'm hypothesizing that either the harddrive or ata card is the culprit, but I thought you guys might have a more educated opinion. Message follows:


Yesterday night after arriving home I turned on my monitor to find that the computer had crashed (bluescreen). I restarted the computer and the computer crashed again after the Windows XP Professional loading screen finisehd. I tried over and over but the computer would either crash or restart itself once it got past the load screen. A couple times it asked if I wanted to start in Safe Mode and I did so only to have it crash again. Then the one time it didn't crash I moved the files I needed that were still on my desktop over to my storage partition because at this point I decided I would try reformatting and reinstalling Windows. The formatting process went smoothly but installation had some problems because every so often a message would pop up indicating a file couldn't be copied from the Windows CD and prompted me to specify the files' location and retry. I just kept hitting retry and eventually installation finished.

After installing I attempted to get all the updates for Windows, but this process was not without its problems also because during the installation process some of the files would fail to install and I'd have to attempt the update installation again. As with the Windows installation I eventually finished all the critical updates with the exception SP2 - every time I try to install SP2 it fails during the verification process. I'm fairly certain that it's not a problem with the CD key because I've used it to install SP2 on this computer before. Finally I decided to take a break from the updates by entertaining myself by going through my storage partition because I was becoming very frustarted with the entire process; to my dismay I discovered that the folder I store all my files in became corrupted. This is the same folder that I previously moved the files on my desktop into while I was in Safe Mode before I formatted my system partition.

 

[mechBgon]

Is it an off-the-shelf Happy Meal? computer (Gateway, Dell, eMachine) or is it "built?" Any specs, age, pertinent info?

 

[Sheepathon]

It's a self built computer. As far as I can remember, he has an Antec case with one of those TruePower powersupplies at 450w, P4 2.4ghz, 512 RD RAM, a western digital harddrive w/8mb cache, audigy2, and a geforce ti4200. No RAID. Unfortunately, I don't remember his motherboard or the chipset. I'll ask him to run CPU-Z when he gets back to me.

I think it was built either late 2002 or early 2003.

 

[mechBgon]

For it not being your computer, that is good spec remembering 🙂 If you can nail down what mobo, that would be great. If it really does use RAMBUS RDRAM then it's 4th down and time to send in the punter 😉

From the symptoms, I was thinking maybe memory failure, insufficient memory voltage or maybe a bad PSU causing insufficient memory voltage as a secondary effect. If there is a possibility of needing to buy new stuff, he could always start with a beefy ATX 2.0 power supply like maybe an Antec TruePower 480, and if that isn't a cure then at least he has one of the parts he'll need in order to rebuild with a new present-day mobo & CPU.

On a practical note, I heard good things about this data-recovery software if he needs some: http://www.r-studio.com Smack the drive into a healthy system and run that and see what it could recover. Hope that helps! 🙂

 

[daveybrat]

With all the corruption he's getting, it's either Ram or Hard drive going south. Have him run Memtest for the Ram and Western Digital's hard drive test on his drive.

Good luck! 🙂

 

[Sheepathon]

I know for sure that he uses RD RAM. Still waiting for him to get back to me with those CPU-Z screenshots...

Oh, and I remember the specs somewhat well because we built our systems at relatively the same time and I helped him shop for a lot of the components. I went with the DDR2700 and recommended him to do the same, but he just wanted to go with the rambus mobo and memory 😕

 

[Sheepathon]

He finally got back to me. Here's his CPU-Z report:

CPU
Name Intel Pentium 4
Code Name Northwood
Specification Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
Family / Model / Stepping F 2 4
Extended Family / Model 0 0
Brand ID 9
Package mPGA-478
Core Stepping B0
Technology 0.13 µ
Supported Instructions Sets MMX, SSE, SSE2
CPU Clock Speed 2405.6 MHz
Clock multiplier x 18.0
Front Side Bus Frequency 133.6 MHz
Bus Speed 534.6 MHz
L1 Data Cache 8 KBytes, 4-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Trace Cache 12 Kµops, 8-way set associative
L2 Cache 512 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed 2405.6 MHz (Full)
L2 Location On Chip
L2 Data Prefetch Logic yes
L2 Bus Width 256 bits

Mainboard and Chipset
Motherboard manufacturer Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Motherboard model 8IHXP, 2.x
BIOS vendor American Megatrends Inc.
BIOS revision 07.00T
BIOS release date 10/03/2002
Chipset Intel i850E rev. A3
Southbridge Intel 82801DB (ICH4) rev. 01
Sensor chip Winbond W83627HF
Graphic Interface AGP
AGP Status enabled, rev. 2.0
AGP Data Transfer Rate 4x
AGP Max Rate 4x
AGP Side Band Addressing supported, enabled
AGP Aperture Size 128 Mbytes

Memory
DRAM Type RDRAM
DRAM Size 512 MBytes
DRAM Frequency 534.6 MHz
FSB: DRAM 1:1
Total CAS# (tRDRAM) 10 clocks
Row To Column (tRCD) 7 clocks
# of memory modules 2
Module 0 Samsung RDRAM PC1066 - 256 MBytes
Module 1 Samsung RDRAM PC1066 - 256 Mbytes

Windows version Microsoft Windows XP Professional (Build 2600)
DirectX version 8.1b