comp wont POST

[Davegod]

Left my comp on but with monitor turned off for an hour or so to watch tv, came back, turned monitor on and its behaving like there's no signal. Turn comp off, turn back on, monitor LED just keeps blinking and no beep from PCspeaker. Keyboard numlock etc LED's dont come on, nor does the light on my MS mouse. The led's do come on for the cd drive/cdrw - im not sure but maybe they blink a bit more than usual? - but dont know about HDD as the case doesnt have an LED for it and its always been silent (tried putting XP cd in cd drive but it didnt boot off it, also checked no cables loose to HDD). I've opened up the side and all fans are spinning, and the LED on mobo also shows it's getting power. I replaced the GF3ti200 i'd been overclocking a little with an old PCI Diamond Edge 2MB and no change. There's no burnt smell or anything in the case, simply was working, left for an hour and suddenly not working.

Next pointer would be BIOS but mines a gigabyte, with dualbios which should kick in and load the backup bios - its done this once before. This seems to leave only either a b0rk mobo or RAM (i've 3 sticks, about to try each one in turn next). One thing that might indicate whats up - twice today I got some odd blue screen, i guess the XP equivalent of the BSOD, basically saying its halted the system to prevent damage, and to restart the pc. Never had this before, happened right after i downloaded and installed UT2003 patch 2166 (i do have Norton AV with yesterday's def's and DL'd from a reputed GSP.

Any other ideas? Does a duff mobo look most likely? Can I be sure and any ideas if it' still under warranty (bought in early Nov last year).

My rig is in sig, but breifly:
MOBO: GA-7VTXH (Gigabyte KT266a)
CPU: AMD 2400+
GFX: GF3ti200 (oc'd 200/460)
RAM: 3x256mb Crucial PC2100
HDD: SG barracuda IV 40gb
PSU: Antec TP 430w

- nb the xp2400+ and antec psu are under a month old. Had been checking temps with MBM5 carefully since intsalling them and was about cpu40-45C; system 30-35C.

 

[Davegod]

well comp loading now, but getting frequent BSOD*. Dunno why wouldnt boot before but does now.

XP seems happy when running chkdsk, norton disk doctor passes. trying to see the properties of HDD in device manager instantly came up with BSOD, but then on reboot is was ok? used the error-checking tool for both partitions, with the "check for bad sectors" ticked, and passed fine. Tried running "memtest86" and have no clue whats going on there, it ran for at least an hour and i came back, it was on test 4 and counting from 768 down to about 512 and back up again and again. I dont mind admitting i had no idea what, if anything, that prog was trying to tell me.

The odd thing is the BSOD comes down with like no pattern - it mostly comes soon as trying to run some program, but the same program will run fine after a reboot. NB, one of the first things i did after it booted ok was to turn ram timings to default (inc. enabling SPD) and remove the overclock on the ti200.

I noticed something new in msconfig/startup - "%systemroot%\system32\dumprep 0 -k". Using startup.cpl i found its calling itself KernelFaultCheck. I can only guess this is something to do with Rivatuner or is some XP thing activated by the BSOD's?


Any ideas whats wrong with my comp? Bad ram? OS problem? 🙁


* the bsod starts with "a problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer...". The actual error messages change, twice i've seen "IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL".

 

[Davegod]

bump? 🙁 🙁

trying to think of any changes made recently, all i can think of is running ut2003's 2166 update and a critical XP update, I think it was "Q32984" (I use windows update and then download them individually so i can reinstall & repatch OS without too much downloading, due to having 64k isdn). Before that, er: rivatuner, wincpuid, tweakxp (now nuinstalled)...

 

[Davegod]

🙁 🙁 🙁 🙁

no ideas?? I cant even backup files with Nero, it dies a BSOD everytime it gets to writing the cd. messages ive seen are:

"an attempt was made to write to read only memory"
"MEMORY_MANAGEMENT"
"BAD_POOL_CALLER"
"PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA"

 

[Celstar]

try working with one stick of memory at a time to see if it stabilizes.

 

[Davegod]

bit odd tbh, after a bit of shuffling i thought i had the bad stick out and it BSOD. reseated the sticks and its been stable since, going to try hte 3rd "most likely to be bad" stick tm and see if maybe some pins got lose or something on the ram socket, either way it's stable now and at worst a small mobo problem or a 256mb stick of ram costing £42 (damn, almost 50% more than when i got them) to replace is at fault.