Hi, I also posted this on General Hardware as I am desperate and would appreciate any insight or advice as to how to solve this problem. I've hired professionals and they're stumped too.
Basic tale of woe: every hour on the hour, the computer shuts down with the blue screen of death. Message varies, maybe page fault, or something else, I don't remember because it quickly, automatically reboots. I had two techies look it over, their best guess was a hard drive was failing and sending an error message every hour, that's why the crash. It stopped doing it for awhile, amidst a host of other problems. I tried slowing down the CPU from it's rated 1.33 ghz to 1.0, slowed down memory to 8 ns instead of 7, to SPD, etc. Nothing consistently worked.
More attempted cures: After reformatting and reinstalling Windows 2000 Pro several times (this has gone on for months!) I bought a new C: hard drive, a Maxtor Diamond + 60 gig. Formatted it in NTFS, installed Windows 2000, service packs 2 and 3 (I'm getting real good at this), everything ran smooth...for awhile. Except on the brand new install, when I tried to copy over my entire old hard drive to the new drive, the system would crash. Never had done that before. If I copied over in smaller increments, like directories instead of a whole drive, anything that wouldn't take more than a minute or two to complete, it wouldn't crash.
Anyway, here's the main problem: the system is back to doing the same old thing: crashing every hour no matter what I'm doing, even if it's just sitting there.
The data drive H: I've had all along is a 40 gig, Maxtor Diamond + model, 7200 rpm, 8.7 ns seek. Both HDs run off the onboard Promise Controller (board is an Asus A7v-133) , each set up and cabled as main drives, and the C: drive boots through the controller. Via 4 in 1 update installed (v.37 I think) and v.33 of Promise drivers. Or vice versa. Not the most recent drivers but I'm so tired of reinstalling my whole system and programs (about 7 times now). Also flashed the bios of the mainboard about a year ago to bring it up to date. Haven't done it in awhile, maybe a new version would help, but I think my problem is more fundamental. The CPU: Athlon 1.33 Ghz, not overclocked.
Memory is good Crucial Cas2, 3 sticks of 256MB, manually set in bios to Cas2, 7ns, rather than SPD, because somebody on this board said that Crucial said these sticks don't like SPD.
what else? I would get a lot of drive corruptions with my old Diamond+ 40 gig C: drive, it would run chkdsk alot when I'd boot up.
I routinely have these symptoms: I'd hear the motherboard do the normal beep when it posted, then a few seconds later a double-beep, which is I think a motherboard warning of a hardware problem. The double beep would continue every 10 or 15 seconds until bootup. Although often it wouldn't boot up at all, just flash a black DOS-type screen with the line "hit any key to reboot". I would then have to switch off the power (Antec 300 watt case), then power up again, and after five or six times, (but sometimes 20, sometimes 2 times, it was never consistent) it would finally power up without the double beep, then the system would work fine...except it would crash every hour. With the new hard drive, I haven't had that problem, at least.
What a colossal wierd deal, huh? But wait, there's more: Now, even if it powers up without the double beep from the moboard, it's crashing again on the hour. So I never know if it's coming or not...because yesterday, for instance, it ran all day without a crash! This morning, powered it up, nothing different than usual except maybe the weather changed, and no beeps...but 60 minutes later, blue screen time and auto reboot. Arrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!
Also, my data drive, drive H:, doesn't always show up in Explorer.exe, even if the system has successfully started up. I'm wondering if I replaced the wrong hard drive, maybe the H: is the culprit, not the original C:. Or maybe there's something wrong with my power supply. Or maybe I've got a virus, except I've scanned for that and haven't found one. Or maybe microscopic aliens have invaded my motherboard and are trying to take over the world.
But wait, there's more! Other symptoms:
Windows Event viewer routinely posts the following messages each time it crashes and reboots itself (I still get the good old blue screen of death, but it doesn't leave the message on long enough for me to copy much down, as I'm usually working on something and surprised by the crash-though I sure as hell shouldn't be by now-and don't get it copied down. Might be a page fault, but it's not always the same message. I'll try to copy it next time and report back to this thread.
Anyway, here's what Event Viewer usually says:
- Printer Fax failed to initialize because a suitable Windows NT Fax Driver driver could not be found.
- Microsoft (R) Windows 2000 (R) 5.0 2195 Service Pack 3 Uniprocessor Free.
- The Event log service was started.
- The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000001e (0xc0000005, 0xf202332d, 0x00000000, 0x00000028). Microsoft Windows 2000 [v15.2195]. A dump was saved in: C:\WINNT\Minidump\Mini100502-01.dmp.
I'm ready to throw the whole thing out the window and start over, but don't want to spend the money to get a new moboard, memory and cpu. For the first year I built up this system, it ran like a champ. So it's got to be a hardware issue.
Sincerely hope someone's got a clue as to what I should do, I'm stumped and so frustrated, but can't just drop another 500 clams to get a more stable (Pentium this time I think) board, ram and cpu.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Jim Lawrence
The HIGHLY TECHNICAL FORUM is not for troubleshooting.
AnandTech Moderator
Basic tale of woe: every hour on the hour, the computer shuts down with the blue screen of death. Message varies, maybe page fault, or something else, I don't remember because it quickly, automatically reboots. I had two techies look it over, their best guess was a hard drive was failing and sending an error message every hour, that's why the crash. It stopped doing it for awhile, amidst a host of other problems. I tried slowing down the CPU from it's rated 1.33 ghz to 1.0, slowed down memory to 8 ns instead of 7, to SPD, etc. Nothing consistently worked.
More attempted cures: After reformatting and reinstalling Windows 2000 Pro several times (this has gone on for months!) I bought a new C: hard drive, a Maxtor Diamond + 60 gig. Formatted it in NTFS, installed Windows 2000, service packs 2 and 3 (I'm getting real good at this), everything ran smooth...for awhile. Except on the brand new install, when I tried to copy over my entire old hard drive to the new drive, the system would crash. Never had done that before. If I copied over in smaller increments, like directories instead of a whole drive, anything that wouldn't take more than a minute or two to complete, it wouldn't crash.
Anyway, here's the main problem: the system is back to doing the same old thing: crashing every hour no matter what I'm doing, even if it's just sitting there.
The data drive H: I've had all along is a 40 gig, Maxtor Diamond + model, 7200 rpm, 8.7 ns seek. Both HDs run off the onboard Promise Controller (board is an Asus A7v-133) , each set up and cabled as main drives, and the C: drive boots through the controller. Via 4 in 1 update installed (v.37 I think) and v.33 of Promise drivers. Or vice versa. Not the most recent drivers but I'm so tired of reinstalling my whole system and programs (about 7 times now). Also flashed the bios of the mainboard about a year ago to bring it up to date. Haven't done it in awhile, maybe a new version would help, but I think my problem is more fundamental. The CPU: Athlon 1.33 Ghz, not overclocked.
Memory is good Crucial Cas2, 3 sticks of 256MB, manually set in bios to Cas2, 7ns, rather than SPD, because somebody on this board said that Crucial said these sticks don't like SPD.
what else? I would get a lot of drive corruptions with my old Diamond+ 40 gig C: drive, it would run chkdsk alot when I'd boot up.
I routinely have these symptoms: I'd hear the motherboard do the normal beep when it posted, then a few seconds later a double-beep, which is I think a motherboard warning of a hardware problem. The double beep would continue every 10 or 15 seconds until bootup. Although often it wouldn't boot up at all, just flash a black DOS-type screen with the line "hit any key to reboot". I would then have to switch off the power (Antec 300 watt case), then power up again, and after five or six times, (but sometimes 20, sometimes 2 times, it was never consistent) it would finally power up without the double beep, then the system would work fine...except it would crash every hour. With the new hard drive, I haven't had that problem, at least.
What a colossal wierd deal, huh? But wait, there's more: Now, even if it powers up without the double beep from the moboard, it's crashing again on the hour. So I never know if it's coming or not...because yesterday, for instance, it ran all day without a crash! This morning, powered it up, nothing different than usual except maybe the weather changed, and no beeps...but 60 minutes later, blue screen time and auto reboot. Arrrrrrrrrrrggggggggggghhhhhhhhhh!
Also, my data drive, drive H:, doesn't always show up in Explorer.exe, even if the system has successfully started up. I'm wondering if I replaced the wrong hard drive, maybe the H: is the culprit, not the original C:. Or maybe there's something wrong with my power supply. Or maybe I've got a virus, except I've scanned for that and haven't found one. Or maybe microscopic aliens have invaded my motherboard and are trying to take over the world.
But wait, there's more! Other symptoms:
Windows Event viewer routinely posts the following messages each time it crashes and reboots itself (I still get the good old blue screen of death, but it doesn't leave the message on long enough for me to copy much down, as I'm usually working on something and surprised by the crash-though I sure as hell shouldn't be by now-and don't get it copied down. Might be a page fault, but it's not always the same message. I'll try to copy it next time and report back to this thread.
Anyway, here's what Event Viewer usually says:
- Printer Fax failed to initialize because a suitable Windows NT Fax Driver driver could not be found.
- Microsoft (R) Windows 2000 (R) 5.0 2195 Service Pack 3 Uniprocessor Free.
- The Event log service was started.
- The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x0000001e (0xc0000005, 0xf202332d, 0x00000000, 0x00000028). Microsoft Windows 2000 [v15.2195]. A dump was saved in: C:\WINNT\Minidump\Mini100502-01.dmp.
I'm ready to throw the whole thing out the window and start over, but don't want to spend the money to get a new moboard, memory and cpu. For the first year I built up this system, it ran like a champ. So it's got to be a hardware issue.
Sincerely hope someone's got a clue as to what I should do, I'm stumped and so frustrated, but can't just drop another 500 clams to get a more stable (Pentium this time I think) board, ram and cpu.
Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Jim Lawrence
The HIGHLY TECHNICAL FORUM is not for troubleshooting.
AnandTech Moderator
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