Help - Machine check exception - happens almost always

[jazzisjazz]

mornin to ya'll
I get the blue screen message machine check exception which includes the following

0x0000009c (0x00000000,0x8054DA70,oxCC0000FF,0x20040189)

I googled it. It seems the cpu is seeing some sort of error that cannot be corrected for - may be coming from hardware ( vague guess from the pages I skimmed through) . I wiggled my vid card and modem card with no effect,reduced cpu to normal speed ( 2.4@3.06) with no effect, then switched out memory sticks with no effect. It sees to happen soon after power on, you may get into windows and open a program and you may not get into windows before bluescreen. Any ideas?

By the way
WinXP SP2
Abit IT7 Max
kingston hyperx
mushkinpc3200 2-2-2
maxtor 40gb in raid 1
visiontek geforce3 Ti200
56k modem
dvd-rom
2 cd-burners

thanks for any help,

jazzisjazz
🙂
UPDATE
First more details
I have disconnected power to all cd/dvd drives
and disconnected all printers/scanners/speakers/usb cables etc.

The IT7 was setup to boot from 1 of 2 total raid arrays

a 40gb disk i was using to save files on was/is connected to the main(non raid) ata controller of the board.

With the raid array drives connected to power
If I disconnect the 40gb files disk the raid controller sees it's disks(lists them at bios level) and the boot continues untill I get the message that I need to insert a boot disk to continue - If operating properly it should see a boot disk in a raid array.

With the raid array drives connected to power
If I connect the 40gb files disk it will try to boot into windows( with previous failures it now continues to the page with the options for safe mode, last good and normal) - and whatever choice is made almost immeadiately gives the blue screen last file listed in safe mode boot (before bluescreen) is iomdisk.sys ------- This is a guess - It may be trying to boot from the 40gb files drive because it cannot find a bootable disk in the raid setup - although it should.

With the raid array drives disconnected from power
and 40gb files drive powered - it will continue to the boot options page and whatever you choose bluescreen will immeadiately follow

With the raid array drives disconnected from power
and the 40gb files drive also disconnected - it continues untill it messages that it needs a boot drive to continue.

Possible conclusions

anytime the 40gb file disk is connected I get blue screen - can I assume that either the controller, the driver for the controller or the disk itself is bad(seems to work ok in a usb2 enclosure connected to another machine - would it be a good test to reconnect a cdrom alone on this controller to see if I get a blue screen?

The bootable raid array is fubared somehow - the best i can hope for is to pull some data from the drive and start over

Hope I have made things clearer rather than more confusing.

What do you guys think?

 

[krcat1]

I found this at MSDN Link

You might want to goto MSDN and search for "machine check exception" ( you might need to use IE on this one. )

It looks like there is some sort of hardware failure.

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: jazzisjazz
mornin to ya'll
I get the blue screen message machine check exception which includes the following

0x0000009c (0x00000000,0x8054DA70,oxCC0000FF,0x20040189)

I googled it. It seems the cpu is seeing some sort of error that cannot be corrected for - may be coming from hardware ( vague guess from the pages I skimmed through) . I wiggled my vid card and modem card with no effect,reduced cpu to normal speed ( 2.4@3.06) with no effect, then switched out memory sticks with no effect. It sees to happen soon after power on, you may get into windows and open a program and you may not get into windows before bluescreen. Any ideas?

By the way
WinXP SP2
Abit IT7 Max
kingston hyperx
mushkinpc3200 2-2-2
maxtor 40gb in raid 1
visiontek geforce3 Ti200
56k modem
dvd-rom
2 cd-burners

thanks for any help,

jazzisjazz
🙂

If you boot in safe mode does the same thing happen?

If you remove all additional hardware not required to boot, does the same thing happen?

 

[jazzisjazz]

bump for more help - updated info in edited top of post

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: jazzisjazz
bump for more help - updated info in edited top of post

I'll describe this in general; if you're interested I'll answer specific questions.

1. Do a parallel install of XP to the RAID array, to C:\XP.
2. Backup the files in c:\windows\system32\config, particularly system, sam, software, and security.
3. Copy sam, system, software, and security from c:\windows\repair to the config directory above.
4. See if you can boot.

You can also do this with a Bart's PE Boot CD, which is a far better and easier way of doing this. Or install XP to the 40G drive and use that to look at your RAID array's volumes.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I sometimes get Machine Check errors on boot, but not BSODs or exceptions. Rarely, they would show up with a dialog at startup (when I had Fast User Switching disabled, I think), now I only (rarely) see them in the System Event Log. It's known that my AMD TBred-A CPU only partially supports the Intel MCE architecture though, there are a few AMD errata about it, I think that is the problem, since the system is otherwise mostly rock-solid stability-wise. I'm guessing that some of the MCE-related MSRs are initialized to random values at power-on rather than cleared, and then XP is querying them and detecting some unusual condition. I'm pretty certain that my issue is different though than the OP's.

 

[Oceanic]

So is this the driver that reads IDE on the menu when running the nf4 set up, or just the SW or whatever driver it asks for after? or both that causes the problem?

 

[Oceanic]

bump?