Uh oh. More A8N system problems

[ahurtt]

So I have been running stable on my A8N SLI Deluxe for about 3 weeks with my Winchester A64 3200+ modestly overclocked 15% to 2300MHz (230 x 10). Got BIOS 1004-001 on it and most recently published nForce drivers. All was going smoothly until a few minutes ago. . .Was playing BF Vietnam when suddenly the system froze. Then when I rebooted, Windows XP would not come back up. It would get to the logo screen with the little blue bar going across then just suddenly flash a fast BSOD (too fast to read) and reboot again. It just did this over and over again. Here's my setup:

Asus A8N SLI Deluxe
Winchester Athlon 64 3200+
1 Gig (2x512) Corsair PC3200 (DDR400)
2 x BFG 6600GT OC PCI exp.
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 250 Gig SATA I w/ 16MB cache and NCQ
Generic Sony DVD/CD-RW combo drive
1.44MB legacy floppy
OCZ ModStream 450 Watt PSU

I was able to recover by booting off my Win XP Pro CD and letting it analyze my hard drive and "repair" it. All it really told me was "Windows has performed maintenance on your Hard Drive and needs to reboot." So when it rebooted, now the system came back up. Now this happened one time before because the boot sector had corrupted but it was when I tried to overclock by waaay too much. So I backed off on the OC and it has been working fine even with NCQ enabled for the last 3 weeks since that happened. I thought the new nForce drivers were really working well. Now I don't know what to think. I have disabled NCQ again for now. I guess what I want to know is what is the best way to figure out if there is something wrong with the hard drive or if this is still a crappy driver issue. . .or both? What are some good scan tools (preferably free) available to verify drive integrity? I ran chkdsk but that didn't report any problem. I am curious as to what exactly the windows install CD did to my drive to fix the problem when it "performed maintenance on my hard drive." I am very glad I didn't have to do a complete reinstall this time but I'd really like to get to the bottom of this. Anybody got any useful tools they can recommend or pointers they can give me?

 

[ChineseDemocracyGNR]

Maybe the beta BIOS you installed caused your problems.

 

[ahurtt]

The beta bios has been running for 3 weeks fine. It was this bios that even enabled the motherboard to detect my hard drive. With the "official" release bios, my hard drive is undetected by the system, period.

 

[imported_2x]

You have one of those maxtors that have been having issues with this board. Disabling NCQ for now is a good idea. Did you go into event log and look for the error log to see what XP reported? That may give you a lead if windows recorded some info about the crash.

 

[Thorsson]

Yeah it's the Maxtor. The latest NVidia drivers enable NCQ by default. I found out this the hard way. The Board/HD are stable without NCQ. With NCQ enabled and an OC (I found that it ran OK at stock) you will get BSODs and corrupted Windows. Even worse I lost my entire Documents folder.

BTW you need to disable automatic reboot and then you can see the BSOD message.

 

[ahurtt]

Yes I checked event viewer and there was nothing in any of the logs that appeared related to the failure. After I recovered and disabled NCQ, I went into the system properties and set the startup and recovery options not to automatically restart on system failure. Hopefully if it happens again it will stop on the blue screen when I reboot again so I can see it long enough to read it. Are there any tools better than chkdsk that can scan my hard drive for errors, bad sectors and whatnot? I have a feeling it is a driver or bios issue of some kind but I'd like to rule out the possibility of a bad hard drive. I also bumped my HT multiplier down to 4x from 5x since I am overclocking 230 x 10 (normal stock speed is 200 x 10). It was running fine with the HT multiplier at 5x (1150) for the last three weeks and I really have no idea if this was the cause or not. . .but I figure I can live with my HT bus at 920 instead of the rated 1000 if it will give me a stable system. My vCore is currently 1.5375 and ddr voltage is set to 2.8. The PCI bus is set to lock at 33.33 MHz in the bios also. I don't get it. . .3 weeks running stable then BOOM, this happens.

 

[ahurtt]

Originally posted by: Thorsson


BTW you need to disable automatic reboot and then you can see the BSOD message.

Thanks. Yeah I have gone in and disabled the auto reboot after recovering using the Windows CD. Only thing is that the blue screen did not come up on the initial crash. It only came up and flashed briefly when the system tried to reboot after the crash. I just saw a brief flash of blue with white text and then it booted again. and again. . and again. Every time just got a brief flash of a blue screen shortly after the windows logo appeared. Even if a blue screen happened at the time of the crash,before the first reboot, and I just didn't see it, I still don't see any dump log on my system or anything.

 

[MrVeedo]

have you changed your video drivers? i see alot of people having that same blue screen flash that switched to a certain nvidia driver.

 

[ahurtt]

That was one other thing MrVeedo. Once I did get the system recovered, I started playing BF Vietnam again and got another lockup before too long. This time it did not totally kill the system so I was able to kill the process (the game) and I could see an system alert popup message on the desktop saying that the nVidia driver had stopped functioning properly. So I shut down and rebooted and this time the system still came up. So I uninstalled the video drivers I had been using (v71.25 WHQL) and booted to safe mode and installed the 71.81 WHQL beta drivers instead. So far they are working ok but only with a few hours testing / using. I don't know if the drivers I was using really had a problem or if something about the crash and the ensuing repair / recovery broke them. Thankfully I have the OS and drivers on their own 16 GB partition and everything else I installed on a second partition so if I do ever need to wipe and reinstall windows I don't have to loose everything. But whats to say that next time it happens it won't corrupt something on my data partition? What's worse, what if it already corrupted stuff on there and I just don't know it yet!?

 

[Speedo]

I don't think you loose any performance by lowering the HT speed one step. I think pushing the HT speed to the max is just asking for trouble.

Thorsson: I will have the Maxtor in my system, and was also planning on overclocking. Having NCQ enable is tempting. If using a stable OC and correct HT/Mem dividers, I don't see why NCQ would cause problems when overclocking. Is it because the SATA is running above spec? Where is the SATA speed derrived from?