Hey folks,
So a couple weeks ago one of my machines went on the fritz and has been messed up ever since. The specs are as follows:
Antec 450W TPII in a P180
ECS KN1 SLI Extreme
AND Athlon 64 3500+ Venice
2x 512 DDR400 @ 3/3/3/8
eVGA GeForce 7800gt CO
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
1x 80GB IDE
1x 120GB SATA
2x 250GB SATA
LiteOn DVDRW
Anyway, it had been chugging along virtually problem free for about 6 months. All of a sudden it started losing system files - you know when you boot up windows and it says hal.dll is missing or corrupted, or that NTLDR is missing, wierd issues like that. It wasn't consistent either, sometimes it would be one error, sometimes another. Strangely, I was able to boot windows successfully most of the time by just sticking my disc in the drive, and booting. Note that I did NOT start setup, or do a repair. Simply having the disc in the drive allowed Windows to boot. I had a RAID back then with 2 80GB IDE drives for my boot volume, so I figured one of them was going bad.
I dealt with the issue for awhile, and eventually got off my lazy ass, backed up my files, and started trying to fix it. Getting into the recovery console and doing the usual stuff - fixboot, fixmbr, bootcfg /repair, even manually extracting hal.dll off the cd. Nothing worked. In fact, once I messed up the ntldr so badly that having the disc in the drive no longer got things started. Okay - good thing I backed up. I disassembled the RAID, tested both drives with a WD Diagnosics boot CD, They both passed 2 iterations of the extended test. I decided against RAID, since on the nForce4 it makes Linux or Vista a bit tricky, so I only have the 1 80GB now as my boot drive. I formatted and reinstalled, and everything was fine for about a day.
Then - BOOM, missing hal.dll again. I figured it was a coincidence, and tried the repair stuff again. No effect. I tried a repair install. No effect. So last night I formatted and reinstalled AGAIN. It seemed to work fine last night, but come to think of it, I had the windows CD in the drive the whole time so I wouldn't have known even if it wasnt working.
This morning I boot her up, without the cd in the drive, and again, missing hal.dll. Same thing, having the disc in the drive makes it work perfectly! I am at my wits end. The only things I can think are the follwing:
1) Bad RAM? I checked all my SPDs for reccommended timings, and matched them (see desc). When the system works, it works perfectly. Passes multiple iterations of Superpi, and I do lots of video encoding which is VERY stressful on RAM, and have no issues doing that at all.
2) Bad PSU? Recently (and yes I know I was an idiot for doing this) I was changing some fan connections when the system power was on *smacks self upside head*, and accidentally bumped into the wires leading into my hard drive's Molex connector. I heard the dreaded click of a hard drive resetting. Of course, windows immediately froze, and blue screened with a kernel_inpage_error if I recall correctly. Perhaps I have a faulty connector? Touching it shouldn't mess it up like that.
3) Bad motherboard? Perhaps I have a slightly retarded IDE channel?
4) Bad hard drive? It seems unlikely, given that I tested it twice with the manufacturer tool, and it passed without issues, and has no other typical bad HD symptoms like clicking, CRC errors, or general slowness.
5) Virus? Perhaps there's something in my backup files that is eating my tasty hal.dll every time I start copying my data back to my user account... Note that I only copy the contents of my documents and my desktop back, along with firefox bookmarks. I didnt even have time to do this last night, so I find this very unlikely. I very very rarely get viruses, and have an updated version of AVG on my system. I scanned everything with it last night, and found nothing.
Seems like the PSU is at fault, but before I go out and drop $60 on a new one, I wanted to get an opinion from you guys.
What do you think? I'm ready to start tearing my hair out.
~MiSfit
So a couple weeks ago one of my machines went on the fritz and has been messed up ever since. The specs are as follows:
Antec 450W TPII in a P180
ECS KN1 SLI Extreme
AND Athlon 64 3500+ Venice
2x 512 DDR400 @ 3/3/3/8
eVGA GeForce 7800gt CO
Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS
1x 80GB IDE
1x 120GB SATA
2x 250GB SATA
LiteOn DVDRW
Anyway, it had been chugging along virtually problem free for about 6 months. All of a sudden it started losing system files - you know when you boot up windows and it says hal.dll is missing or corrupted, or that NTLDR is missing, wierd issues like that. It wasn't consistent either, sometimes it would be one error, sometimes another. Strangely, I was able to boot windows successfully most of the time by just sticking my disc in the drive, and booting. Note that I did NOT start setup, or do a repair. Simply having the disc in the drive allowed Windows to boot. I had a RAID back then with 2 80GB IDE drives for my boot volume, so I figured one of them was going bad.
I dealt with the issue for awhile, and eventually got off my lazy ass, backed up my files, and started trying to fix it. Getting into the recovery console and doing the usual stuff - fixboot, fixmbr, bootcfg /repair, even manually extracting hal.dll off the cd. Nothing worked. In fact, once I messed up the ntldr so badly that having the disc in the drive no longer got things started. Okay - good thing I backed up. I disassembled the RAID, tested both drives with a WD Diagnosics boot CD, They both passed 2 iterations of the extended test. I decided against RAID, since on the nForce4 it makes Linux or Vista a bit tricky, so I only have the 1 80GB now as my boot drive. I formatted and reinstalled, and everything was fine for about a day.
Then - BOOM, missing hal.dll again. I figured it was a coincidence, and tried the repair stuff again. No effect. I tried a repair install. No effect. So last night I formatted and reinstalled AGAIN. It seemed to work fine last night, but come to think of it, I had the windows CD in the drive the whole time so I wouldn't have known even if it wasnt working.
This morning I boot her up, without the cd in the drive, and again, missing hal.dll. Same thing, having the disc in the drive makes it work perfectly! I am at my wits end. The only things I can think are the follwing:
1) Bad RAM? I checked all my SPDs for reccommended timings, and matched them (see desc). When the system works, it works perfectly. Passes multiple iterations of Superpi, and I do lots of video encoding which is VERY stressful on RAM, and have no issues doing that at all.
2) Bad PSU? Recently (and yes I know I was an idiot for doing this) I was changing some fan connections when the system power was on *smacks self upside head*, and accidentally bumped into the wires leading into my hard drive's Molex connector. I heard the dreaded click of a hard drive resetting. Of course, windows immediately froze, and blue screened with a kernel_inpage_error if I recall correctly. Perhaps I have a faulty connector? Touching it shouldn't mess it up like that.
3) Bad motherboard? Perhaps I have a slightly retarded IDE channel?
4) Bad hard drive? It seems unlikely, given that I tested it twice with the manufacturer tool, and it passed without issues, and has no other typical bad HD symptoms like clicking, CRC errors, or general slowness.
5) Virus? Perhaps there's something in my backup files that is eating my tasty hal.dll every time I start copying my data back to my user account... Note that I only copy the contents of my documents and my desktop back, along with firefox bookmarks. I didnt even have time to do this last night, so I find this very unlikely. I very very rarely get viruses, and have an updated version of AVG on my system. I scanned everything with it last night, and found nothing.
Seems like the PSU is at fault, but before I go out and drop $60 on a new one, I wanted to get an opinion from you guys.
What do you think? I'm ready to start tearing my hair out.
~MiSfit
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