Problems with newly built machine.

[Alexisonfire]

Hi all. Great forum you have here. I am having a small problem with my newly built system. The specs include:

DFI: NF4 SLI-DR motherboard
AMD 4000+ Processor ( ZALMAN CNPS7000B-CU 92mm 2 Ball Cooling Fan )
OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Platinum System Memory
2x Maxtor 300 GIG SATA 16mb cache hard drives
BFG 6800 GT PCIx
SoundBlaster Audigy 2 oem
Pioneer A09 DVD BURNER
OCZ 520 watt powersupply

NOTE: I have yet to update bios. so i'm currently using the bios that it came with straight out of the box ( i don't know the revision number because i am at work at the moment)

The first problem i noticed that when trying to install windows Xp it was extremely slow booting off of the cd.. loading the files neccessary for setup.. (i tried a different cd-rom) Once i finally get into setup. i do a Quick format FOR NTFS.. and right after it starts to load files neccessary for the XP setup it crashes into a blue screen..

Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[sykopath79]

I am assuming you are not overclocking this system (yet). If you are, set everything back to stock clocks. Start with the basic diagnostic steps: run MemTest86 to check your RAM for errors, and you might try running a hard disk scan as well. I recommend downloading the Ultimate Boot CD from www.ultimatebootcd.com because it gives you one bootable CD with lots of utilities. The ones to use would be MemTest86 (to test RAM), Mersenne Prime (basically Prime95, to test CPU stability), and the Maxtor hard disk diagnostic tool.

If all that passes, BIOS update would be the next thing I'd try.

Another thing I find is useful to do with brand new builds is to boot them into a CD-bootable OS (like Knoppix) the first time you boot the system just to see if it works.

 

[Alexisonfire]

Thanks for the information. I am currently running memtest-86.. haven't had any problems and are at about 50%. are there any other suggestions? i have updated my bios to the latest version..

 

[Alexisonfire]

update: memtest-86 locked up at 80% does this mean my memory is completely bad? and is what is causing the problem.?

 

[sykopath79]

Most likely means the RAM is bad... try putting some known good RAM in and running MemTest again. Usually though bad RAM will just result in MemTest showing errors, not freezing up.

I have seen a bad motherboard cause MemTest to lock up before, so that is also a possibility.

 

[rise]

what bios did you use?
do you have all 4 power connectors in the board?
memtest sticks seperately?

 

[Alexisonfire]

i have narrowed down the problem having both memory sticks in dual channels is causing instability.. i am running all default bios options.. are there any options for me that i can change in bios having to do with memory stability?

 

[ScrapSilicon]

Originally posted by: Alexisonfire
i have narrowed down the problem having both memory sticks in dual channels is causing instability.. i am running all default bios options.. are there any options for me that i can change in bios having to do with memory stability?

as rise4310 suggested a single stick at a time testing is your first step after setting default bios settings ..gl