System freezes unexplainably

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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I recently put together a new system and once every hour or so, the system "freezes" without any warning...well here is exactly what happens:

The monitor will turn black and no signal is displayed. The power LED on the case is still on and the Mobo fan can still be heard spinning. CTRL-ALT-DELETE doesn't do anything, nor hitting any keys on the keyboard or mouse.

The only thing that can recover the system at this point is hitting the reset switch. The system then reboots...this is a pain in the neck because it leaves a lot of hard disk errors because of improper shut-down.

One of the AMI BIOS settings is labelled "Power Management Setup". So I disabled all the power management and video off 'features' of this mobo. One of the options is labelled "Restore on AC/Power Loss". The Mobo manual reads:



<< &quot;The settings are power on, power off or last state. During power on, after every AC power loss, the system will be turned on. During last status, after every AC power loss, whatever the system status, it will be the same when the AC power returns.&quot; >>



I then changed the setting from &quot;Power Off&quot; to &quot;Power ON&quot;...now the only difference is that the screen turns BLUE instead of BLACK WHEN FREEZING

Here is my system:

MSI K7Pro Motherboard
Athlon 750 mHz Slot A + triple fan
3 x 128 MB PC-100 RAM
300 Watt power supply ATX case
2 Hard disk drives IDE
1 CD-ROM IDE
1 Floppy disk drive
1 ISA sound card
1 PCI Firewire card
1 NIC Card (3com)
1 AGP Matrox video card G400

What is going on here? Is there a short somewhere? Any ideas on what could be causing this ? Thanks
 

Barefoot

Golden Member
Feb 2, 2001
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Did you check your power supply on the AMD-approved list? If it's not on there, you might point your finger at that to blame. Other than that, the only thing I can come up with might be a heat problem, but that usually doesn't affect the monitor.
 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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I got the case from CompUSA. Its listed as &quot;UL 300 Watt ATX&quot; power supply:

http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?prodzip=&amp;product_code=250076

I've had another Athlon system in the same case about 2 weeks ago without a problem (it was on a Gigabyte 71XE Motherboard)...the system is running Windows 2000 BTW.

Also I just noticed that the monitor that Windows 2000 recognizes is listed as &quot;default&quot; monitor. I'm trying to figure out how to set it to my Goldstar 1465. Maybe this will help.
 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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Here is a picture of my power supply. I read the AMD Athlon &quot;approved&quot; power supply list...unfortunately I can't tell who manufactured this power supply as it came inside the case from CompUSA.

http://www.chootyaz.com/sri/atx_powersupply.jpg

Can anyone help me determine if the powersupply is the source of all my troubles with this newly built Athlon system??

I'm considering following Anandtech's advice and buying an Antec power supply...
 

WarCon

Diamond Member
Feb 27, 2001
3,920
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First off, just to see if its hardware or drivers, or hardware your not looking at. Turn off power management, ::edit - In windows 2000 - end edit:: don't let the monitor or hard drives go into standby. If you don't lock up after doing this, you have found the area of your problem. You might check which blanking method your bios is telling power management to use and make sure your monitor uses it. If the crashes are happening while you are using it then thats not the area to look in. Personally seriously doubt that its your power supply, cuz startup is the biggest area for underpowered problems. Need more data as to when the lockup occur, the more specific the better.
 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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Hi Warcon:

Thanks for your reply...I went into the BIOS settings and turned OFF the power management settings for the monitor, disk drive, suspend mode, everything that I could.

I also realized that I didn't have the AMD AGP miniport drivers installed. I installed them last night and it still freezes, albeit not as often as before.

I have a feeling that its the power supply. The system tends to freeze when I open up lots of programs, or when I use something requiring a lot of graphics power (Adobe photoshop). Anandtech went so far as to describe the problem in an article titled AMD Athlon Buyers Guide: Part 4 Power Supplies.

Any help appreciated. Thanks! :)
 

Marqui

Member
Aug 15, 2000
190
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I had a similar problem with a MSI motherboard and my duron.... random freezes all the time, or the computer would not come back from a standby state. This did not happen in my winme partition... I never really figured it out, but I recently installed the latest bios from MSI and the new 4.29 via 4 in 1 drivers and my freezing went away... I don't know which one fixed the problem, or if the combination of both did the trick, but i've been stable for about 5 days now...

 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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Update:

Last night I went to AMD's website and installed the following:

  1. Windows 2000 AGP Patch for Athlon

    AMD EIDE Busmaster Driver

    Checked the BIOS version on my MB...looks likes its v 1.8 which is the latest release (according to MSI's website).

    Removed the metal side plate on my system case to aid in cooling.

The system still crashes, although not as often as before (now crashes once or twice a day).

Any help appreciated.
 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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Some other lingering questions in my mind:

[*]I can't seem to get Win 2000 to change the default monitor -- When opening up control panel -> Display -> &quot;Settings&quot; tab -> &quot;Advanced&quot; button -> &quot;monitor&quot; tab > the darn monitor type is listed as &quot;default monitor&quot; and the &quot;properties&quot; button is greyed out, it won't let me change the monitor type this way.

[*]Sporadically Win2000 won't recognize some of my USB drives (compact flash card &amp; Zip250 drives) -- this in spite of the USB host adapter showing up correctly in Device manager. I read somewhere on AMD's website last night that this was a known problem with Athlon &amp; Win 2000...does anyone know of a fix for this? Its really not that big of a deal because to solve it, all I really do is unplug the Zip/CF drive and plug it back into the USB hub and then it is recognized.

[*]IRQ listings : I know that different devices can share IRQ addresses, but 5 different devices are sharing IRQ 9!! 4 of the devices are PCI and 1 is ISA?? (see below)



<< 0 ISA System Timer
1 ISA Standard 101/102 or Microsoft Keyboard
3 ISA Communications port (COM 2)
4 ISA Communications port (COM 1)
5 ISA Creative Sound Blaster Plug and Play (WDM)
6 ISA Standard Floppy Disk Controller
8 ISA System CMOS/Standard clock
9 ISA Microsoft ACPI Compliant System
12 ISA Microsoft PS/2 Mouse
13 ISA Numeric data processor
14 ISA Primary IDE Channel
15 ISA Secondary IDE Channel
9 PCI 3COM Etherlink 10/100 PCI TX NIC (3C905B-TX) #2
9 PCI AMD 756 PCI to USB Open Host Controller
9 PCI Matrox Millenium G400 DualHead - English
9 PCI Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
>>



WTF??? Help is GREATLY Appreciated.
 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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Another update.

Every time I try to install the AMD Busmaster drivers, it will start copying files, and midway through the screen turns blue and freezes...the system then goes and resets itself?

WTF? I've tried to install the AMD busmaster drivers 3 separate times...I know that busmastering is not essential, but I thought it may be the source of my problems.

I'm on my way today to get another cooling fan for my mobo (PCI slot type) to see if that helps.

Any one out there with any better ideas? System still freezes every 6-8 hrs or so...moreso when opening up lots of graphic intensive programs (Adobe photoshop, Word, or java applets). Thanks.
 

sgopal2

Senior member
Mar 11, 2001
348
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Problems are now resolved!

The addition of an intake fan and a PCI-slot fan right below the AGP video card seemed to help TREMENDOUSLY. My system hasn't crashed since.

I think that because I was using a 32MB AGP Matrox G400 dual head card, it generated a lot of heat, causing the video card to crash.

Hope this helps someone in the future!