Windows giving DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

[ahurtt]

It has been one thing after another with this motherboard. Last night I was playing some half life and Battlefield and finally starting to enjoy my new system. I put it on Stand By when I went to bed. I came home from work today and went to cut it on and got the windows logo on screen and then it blue screened on me with a message "DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL." I started disabling onboard devices and rebooting. . .no luck. Windows would start in safe mode at least though. Finally I pulled out my second 6600GT and the system in single gpu mode and it would boot normally. I switched the second card into the first slot and tried it alone. Still worked. So I put both back in and same problem. This just started happening out of nowhere!! ALL I did was turn on the computer!!! So I boot into safe mode, and uninstall the 2 cards in device manager. Then I reboot into normal mode and it starts up fine. I reinstall the 66.93 nVidia drivers and it promts me to reboot, so I do. Starts up fine. I enable GPU support in the display control panel and it prompts me to reboot again. So I do. Problem comes back!! If you ask me, this places the blame SQUARELY on nVidia's shoulders for shoddy, untested drivers! I don't know what I'll do next. . .maybe try and switch my Maxtor SATA drive to the Silicon Image controller so it won't disappear when I flash to the 1003 BIOS and try if that fixes it. . .Isn't this a sad state?? Anybody run into this problem or seen a solution to it?

 

[FastEddie]

Alex--what psu are you using?



edit: damn klyborg.

 

[ahurtt]

OCZ ModStream 450 w/ 2 BFG 6600GT OC's, 3200+ Winchester, 1 GIG (2x512) DDR 400. No overclocking at this time. Only 1 sata hd and 1 IDE optical drive. Should be plenty of power. And now the system is up again. . .it seems intermittent. I was just playing half life 2 a minute ago with SLI enabled. . .it's the crappy drivers man. . .it must be. According to what it says in the motherboard manual, this PSU has more than enough juice for this setup. It's 26A on the +12V and single rail.

[Edit] and now that it's up again, no way am I turning it off EVER again. Too many problems with this new technology right now. . .seems like every time I turn on the computer it's a new problem. I'm gonna just leave it run 24-7 and only restart if I have to when it crashes.

[Edit Edit] Oh, and I forgot, I have a SoundBlaster Audigy 2 in there also. But the problem occurred even when I removed it too. It only stopped when I took out the PCIEX 2 video card.

 

[FastEddie]

I'll check around the web and see if anyone else is having similar problems.

 

[Insomniak]

Had a problem like this on my last machine, it turned out Creative's drivers for my soundblaster live just didn't want to play nicely with Windows. I don't know if that has anything to do with you, but if you have a Creative soundcard installed, you may want to try uninstalling it and trying to replicate the issue with onboard sound.

If that fixes the problem, there you go.

 

[ahurtt]

Oh one other thing it did around the same time this error started occurring. . .I don't remember the exact steps I did things. . .One time when it gave this error then the next time it came up, nVidia sentinnel was complaining when windows started up that it had clocked my graphics card down because of low power. Now had I not just had so many other problems with this motherboard, and had I not done so much reading on here before I picked my PSU, and had I not read the power requirements in the motherboard manual, I might actually suspect my PSU. But as of right now, I left the computer on when I went to bed last night instead of turning it off (just turned off the monitor) and it has been running fine ever since I got it back up normally. I went to bed around 12:30 or 1am maybe, and now it is about 10am and it is fine still. Even played a little half life 2 around 8am or so and it was fine. But I am so afraid that if it crashes or looses power or I have to shut it off for any reason, I'm gonna be screwed again.