Hang at Shutdown

[NautikaL 8]

This is on a BRAND NEW install on the following configuration:

Athlon X2 4200+
2GB (4x512mb) GSkill
Chaintech VNF4 Ultra (Nforce 4 Ultra)
Radeon X300se
Windows XP Professional w/ SP2
500w 24pin atx 2.03 psu
2x Hitachi 80GB SATA II in RAID 1

Whenever I try to restart/shutdown windows, the system just hangs and will not turn off. It stays on the screen that says "Windows is Shutting down" but does not freeze, the mouse pointer can still be moved. The hard drives are idle and I cannot hear any disk accessing. I've tried changing the page file size (which is now at 1.5GB) and that does nothing...any ideas? Could it have to do with the raid configuration?

I tried booting into safemode to see if it would shutdown properly, and it still does the same thing. Another thing I noticed was that the two hard drives are listed under the "Safely Remove Hardare" tray icon. Perhaps they are not being properly disconnected at shutdown which causes the system to idley hang. But anyways, why are they even listed there? Is it because they are SATA II drives and are hot-swappable?

edit: I also messed with every single power option in the bios and still the same results. I even tried running with just one stick of ram. I think it has to do with the drives being hotswapable...any way to disable this temporarily?

 

[OdiN]

don't think it's the hotswap...but not sure why it is doing that. How long have you waited for it to shut down?

 

[NautikaL 8]

Like 10minutes...i figured it wasnt doing anything since there was no HD activity. I've tried uninstalling the nvidia drivers, clearing cmos, taking out certain hardware...ive tried everything i can think of. Im about to reformat this thing

edit: hehe 1 year anniversary.

 

[NautikaL 8]

30min now and its still hanging...i can still move the mouse around and turn caps lock/numlock/scroll lock on and off


edit:
I just reformated and still it WILL NOT RESTART. One thing to note, it wont even restart now outside of windows! In windows setup after copying files, it would not restart. After installation it would not restart! WHAT THE HELL!

Someone at another forum said that he had the exact problem on his DFI NF4 and it led to his memory. Here is the exact post

Woah, I have same exact problem with my DFI LanParty Nf4. Nodody seemed to have any similar issues with that board

In my situation, it's not Windows problem, it's problem with BIOS + RAM + MEMORY TABLES WITHIN BIOS

I was lucky, 510-2ModFix is the only BIOS that fixes my PC from that problem. What's different between 510-2ModFix and rest of dfi bioses is that it has modified mem tables, the're tighter than normal ones

Try restarting with one stick of ram or another pair of ram. I can only conclude that in my and yours situation RAM and memory tables don't get together

I'll try some other ram and bios settings pertaining to ram.

 

[OdiN]

Yeah try that..it also could be an ACPI problem of some sort. Hard to say.

 

[NautikaL 8]

ive tried every single option in the bios i could think of other than these:


What are some of these bios settings and what do they do?
Cpu, SATA, and PCIE Spread Spectrum
Under Memory Settings: Bottom of 32-bit IO (input in hex), Read preamble value (ns), async latency value (ns) S/W memory hole remappping, and MTRR maping mode.
Under Advanced CHipset Features: Err94 Enh.
Other settings in there are HT frequency (x1, x2, x3 etc), system bios cacheable, flash bios protection, and HT width.

I even put in some bh-5 and gave that a go...


Edit:


The problem was isolated to the hard drives because it would boot fine and work with just one hard drive running (this is RAID 1).

So anyways...problem solved...i dont know what or why but it works so I could care less...so exhausting.

 

[NautikaL 8]

Well after a few shutdowns of no problems...the problem came back and eventually the array got corrupted


I was about to buy a new motherboard and found one review on the Abit AN8. He said that the board was good but RAID 1 would not work with Windows XP. He had to use Server 2003 for RAID 1 to work. He experienced the exact same problem I had in which the system would not shut down. This problem seems to be nforce4 wide!

 

[Serpent15]

I have the exact same problem you are having, I also have a DFI Lanparty NF4 SLI-DR board. Has anyone made any headway on this problem?

 

[pkme2]

I had the same problem and until I disabled the Raid 0 and Raid 1, it shutdown properly.

 

[ivwshane]

It if happens when you add the hard drive back into the mix then it could be a power supply issue.

Do you have a quality power supply (that doesn't necessarily mean one with a high wattage number).