My machine (a new machine) seems to be unable to boot windows possibly half the time. When it doesn't work it hangs at the first windows splash screen, and will always boot into safe mode but no conflicts are found. Also if I boot in in logged mode or step by step it ALWAYS works, but will always take a few restarts once it dies if I don't go step by step.
The odd part (to me) is that when this happens it will usually take a few tries to
restart, but once it is running I can do a restart through the windows menu (cold boot) ad infinitum with no problems. That would seem to indicate overheating of cpu, ram, video or something, BUT it only seems to have trouble booting when it is cold and has been off for hours which is somewhat baffling. Another strange thing is I accidentally installed windows 3.1 MS Office instead of win98 and I didn't have problems before then (but I only booted it 2-3 times before that so is likely a red herring).
There seem to be random lockups as well, but it is hard to tell if it is a hardware problem or just windows because I have been using the system 2 weeks and it has locked up maybe 3-4 times. I will go for 10 hours without glitches in 3d games but one time locked up after 15 minutes but was playing a somewhat buggy game. Also two times I locked up using Internet Explorer.
system specs:
Voodoo 5 5500 agp
tyan 1834d tiger 133 dual 800eb 133mhz FSB
via chipset (kx133? I forget)
256 MB RAM
maxtor 60gig ata100 drive
promise ata100 controller
liteon 52 truex cdrom
Linksys ethernet
Soundblaster Live! (what's so exciting about it??) value edition
300watt power supply (inwin)
about 7 pounds of fans (I'm not kidding)
win98 based system
Here are my thoughts on what may be problems, please let me know if these are valid, how to test, or better ideas:
Incompatible video/chipset combo because I had to lower the video card to be only 2x agp to make it work. I was also told there are some incompatibilities but this seems a little odd to be video card.
not enough power/bad power supply: I had to get adapters to all the fans (a LOT of fans) directly to the power supply because when it was hooked to MB power it made motherboard act funny(I figured this out after MUCH pain).
remarked CPUs or bad memory: doesn't seem like it is overheating but may still be bad/remarked CPUs. I don't want to mess with voltage but will lower the the FSB to see if problem goes away if this seems likely. If it's bad RAM then I would think it would just not boot period, or completely be random if it booted at all, but it seems to warm boot easily enough and mem tests don't fail.
USB problem: I think I installed a USB devices at same time I installed something else and that I didn't realize that one was still doing the reboot ten times to install shuffle before starting to install the next one. Was a USB flightstick and an intellimouse optical mouse.
Promise ATA 100 card problem: I had to move this to another slot before it would work at all. Also, when I run in logged mode it always works or if I go step by step (and log), too. Possibly it is just that this gives some other subsystem time to warm up, initialize, or whatever though, or the time to write stuff to disk keeps memory access from being as vigorous.
I haven't messed around trying to fix it too much but here is list of things I plan to try and let me know if this makes since:
check to be SURE everything seated correctly - PCI cards, RAM, CPUs etc.
remove USB and mouse to test if that's problem.
lower clock speed/FSB to test RAM and CPU
remove ethernet and soundcard.
try another video card.
swap out RAM.
disconnect power-hungry fans.
pray to God.
If anyone can help then thanks alot. I would also appreciate advice on diagnostic tools, and benchmarks/tests that can check CPUs and RAM if anyone knows links to best ones, especially programs that crunch cpu overnight to test if it will crash or what.
The odd part (to me) is that when this happens it will usually take a few tries to
restart, but once it is running I can do a restart through the windows menu (cold boot) ad infinitum with no problems. That would seem to indicate overheating of cpu, ram, video or something, BUT it only seems to have trouble booting when it is cold and has been off for hours which is somewhat baffling. Another strange thing is I accidentally installed windows 3.1 MS Office instead of win98 and I didn't have problems before then (but I only booted it 2-3 times before that so is likely a red herring).
There seem to be random lockups as well, but it is hard to tell if it is a hardware problem or just windows because I have been using the system 2 weeks and it has locked up maybe 3-4 times. I will go for 10 hours without glitches in 3d games but one time locked up after 15 minutes but was playing a somewhat buggy game. Also two times I locked up using Internet Explorer.
system specs:
Voodoo 5 5500 agp
tyan 1834d tiger 133 dual 800eb 133mhz FSB
via chipset (kx133? I forget)
256 MB RAM
maxtor 60gig ata100 drive
promise ata100 controller
liteon 52 truex cdrom
Linksys ethernet
Soundblaster Live! (what's so exciting about it??) value edition
300watt power supply (inwin)
about 7 pounds of fans (I'm not kidding)
win98 based system
Here are my thoughts on what may be problems, please let me know if these are valid, how to test, or better ideas:
Incompatible video/chipset combo because I had to lower the video card to be only 2x agp to make it work. I was also told there are some incompatibilities but this seems a little odd to be video card.
not enough power/bad power supply: I had to get adapters to all the fans (a LOT of fans) directly to the power supply because when it was hooked to MB power it made motherboard act funny(I figured this out after MUCH pain).
remarked CPUs or bad memory: doesn't seem like it is overheating but may still be bad/remarked CPUs. I don't want to mess with voltage but will lower the the FSB to see if problem goes away if this seems likely. If it's bad RAM then I would think it would just not boot period, or completely be random if it booted at all, but it seems to warm boot easily enough and mem tests don't fail.
USB problem: I think I installed a USB devices at same time I installed something else and that I didn't realize that one was still doing the reboot ten times to install shuffle before starting to install the next one. Was a USB flightstick and an intellimouse optical mouse.
Promise ATA 100 card problem: I had to move this to another slot before it would work at all. Also, when I run in logged mode it always works or if I go step by step (and log), too. Possibly it is just that this gives some other subsystem time to warm up, initialize, or whatever though, or the time to write stuff to disk keeps memory access from being as vigorous.
I haven't messed around trying to fix it too much but here is list of things I plan to try and let me know if this makes since:
check to be SURE everything seated correctly - PCI cards, RAM, CPUs etc.
remove USB and mouse to test if that's problem.
lower clock speed/FSB to test RAM and CPU
remove ethernet and soundcard.
try another video card.
swap out RAM.
disconnect power-hungry fans.
pray to God.
If anyone can help then thanks alot. I would also appreciate advice on diagnostic tools, and benchmarks/tests that can check CPUs and RAM if anyone knows links to best ones, especially programs that crunch cpu overnight to test if it will crash or what.
With all the install complications perhaps you should reformat and start fresh ..but first I would go into safemode and into device manager and see if you dont have about a gazillion duplicates being loaded since you had to move so many things to get the working configuration you may have it really messy in there.. remove all duplicates including the original of the duplicated item and let windows reinstall them once..that may clear up things a bit.. good luck
Facebook
Twitter