Frustrating problem of doom

[Danswulf]

I built a system about 3 months ago, and have nothing but problems with it.
With the first mobo i had, the system would randomly crash. I had recieved the mobo for free anyways and had read that a lot of people had found conflicts with it and the memory they were using. So I decided to replace the motherboard to see if that fixed my problem. I purchased a MSI K8n Neo Platinum.
Now i no longer have the random crashes however there are still major issues with the system. The first being that I cannot install games. Everytime I try, the installations will crash out saying that it cant read a file in the directory the game is being installed to. I didnt have this problem with the first motherboard. I then ram Prime 95 to see what that could tell me. The tests went excruciatingly slow but did not crash. i then asked a friend to run prime 95 on his system with my memory and see if he had the same issue (he has the same motherbpard but a different cpu. I have an AMD 64 3200+ while he has a 3000+). When he ran prime 95 with his ram and then mine, the test took literally a fraction of the time. on my system the test was not completed after 13 hours, yet on his with both sets of memory it was finished in about 4 or less I believe.
Other issues... when installing windows (and this happened with both motherboards) the first few times i tried the installation would crash, sometimes it would just freeze up and sometimes take a memory dump. I also cant seem to play DVDs, I took this cd-rom drive from my old system where it had worked fine, but since being used in this system I cannot play or read dvds ( I dont know if this is a related problem or my drive has just gone bad.)

System Specs:
AMD 64 3200+ with a 1mb cache
MSI k8N Neo Platinum
2x Corsair CMX512-3200C2PT 512MB DDR400 PC3200 XMS Memory
Radeon 9800 Pro
Samsung CD-RW/DVD Drive
2x Western Digital 250GB raided (using a pci raid card)
1x 160GB Maxtor Hdd (ATA)
1x 80GB WD Hdd (ATA)
Adaptec 1200a ata raid card
Antec 550 True Watt PSU

Basically I dont really know what could is causing these issues, if it is a single part or multiple, and I was wondering if there is anyway to figure out what is wrong without having to replace/buy new parts.

thanks

 

[Gamingphreek]

Hmm Well i would first Write 0's to your HDD to make sure EVERYTHING is wiped out. Secondly if that doesn't work it sounds like you have bad or failing secotrs on your HDD. Also i noticed you are using a PCI raid card... first of all i definately wouldn't as they are generally unstable and bandwidth starved... secondly did you install the drivers for it. Also you might want to try just a single HDD without the PCI raid card and without RAID.

-Kevin

 

[mechBgon]

It might also be that your RAM isn't quite getting enough voltage. Try 2.7 volts.

 

[asm0deus]

i disagree on the RAID cards being bandwidth starved and generally unstable, (though that does seem to the most likely source of problems with your setup) you'll generally notice less CPU usage w/ PCI RAID than with on-board IDE and all my experiences with them have proven stable.

 

[Danswulf]

The problems occur with or without the raid setup.Also the raid is not being used as the boot drive, and is just there for storage. Ill try writing the zeros to the main hdd and see what happens, as well as change that memory setting. Also when trying to install games, it doesnt matter which drive i try to install to, it always results in the same thing... the install failing.

 

[AnonymouseUser]

Assuming you have the latest motherboard drivers installed, I'm thinking it has something to do with your IDE setup. Double check your Master/Slave settings for correctness, and I would even recommend trying just one of the ATA HDDs on the primary channel with the CD/DVD drive on the secondary channel. Make sure the BIOS detects them properly.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Post your issue here There are some powerful MSI Jedi there who will know of any board specific issues and such