IRQL_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL

[tungtung]

I was helping a friend of mine who's been having problem with her system.

We have tried reformatting and clean reinstall of Win 98 but the system is so unstable that it just crashed or locked up every few minutes.

Windows 98 installation often crashed with a SUWIN.EXE error.
We tried installing Win 2000 but the installation just locked up with some stop error.
Windows XP was not much help either though this error came up ... IRQL_LESS_OR_NOT_EQUAL ... and then there was a whole hex characters at the end, which changes everytime we tried the installation.

The system is an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ with MSI 745 Ultra.
I have tried anything I can think of, even taking out all the expansion cards, disabling the onboard features (USB, sound, etc) ... none of them helps.

Does anyone has any suggestion as to where the problem is?

 

[johnjkr1]

From my experience, IRQL errors are usually driver related, which is odd since you removed all the extra components and formatted. First thing I would do would be to reset the bios to defaults, remove all unnecessary components, and try again with one stick or ram, then the other (if there are two). If it is still crashing out during the install, try a different cdrom. If that fails, you know you have a bad cpu, mb, ram or power supply, start swapping.

 

[SilverBack]

I recently had this problem with a friends build.
It turned out to be a memory controller on his motherboard going bad.
We replaced the mobo and all is well.

 

[KB]

I had similar issues with one of my PCs. Turned one of the memory sticks was bad. It appears we all agree it is most likely memory related.

 

[boomerang]

You had a few words switched around. Here is the results of a search from the Microsoft Support pages.

 

[EeyoreX]

Check your memory with memtest. Run one stick at a time. More likely than not (I will go so far as to nearly assure you) that this is a RAM issue. Either a bad stick or a bad slot on the motherboard.

\Dan