Cross-Posted I borked my PC thread:
System specs are in Sig, also listed here for ease of reference.
ElaborateDream:
AMD64 X2 4400+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
ATI (BBA) X800XL PCI-Express
2Gb Corsair Value Select (2.5-4-4-8) PC3200
SBLive! 24-bit
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
dual WD 160GB SATA-II HDDs in RAID-1 on Nforce Controller
single Maxtor 80(60?)GB IDE HDD for booting.
So... Gaming along last night, 2am GTA:SA & Battlefield 2 joyousness. BF2 crashes to desktop, but oddly (even for BF2). Get a Windows message about d3d9.dll being screwy. Check DxDiag, and it's the DirectX 9.0 Direct 3D driver, as best I could tell, it's size was off, so I replaced it with a copy off my system backup. (no patches had happened in the meanwhile).
Reboot the system out of safe mode, and the OS loads. Kick up Trillian, and GTA. After 3 seconds of in-game play (rendered images, not menu) GTA dumps to desktop. System log tells me it was shut down to prevent damage to windows... Fire up BF2, and it dies after 2 minutes in game. As I'm looking at the details from that dumping, I get a stop error for NTFS.sys being screwy. Gotta love when the good stuff dies hard.
Reboot, make it into Windows fully, and it throws another Stop error after a few moments on the desktop.
Reboot yet again, and it's stop erroring as soon as it starts loading Windows.
Now, the fun part.
I'm in the reboot loop, preparing to hit F8, and a lighting strike hit the substation a bit downtown from me, the Rack-Grade surge suppressor took the hits just fine it seemed, but it wasn't until the third redundant transformer that one could handle the load. (so, power failure out at the transformer, that one bites it, next one tries & dies under load, same with the next, the last one, and I can hear this in my fountain across the room, and in my UPS'd system's fans (which scared me, as it was through a UPS) strains, browning out the power, and then rises to the challenge.
Check router and other connections, check breakers, everything seemed to have weathered.
Pop in 2k3 CD, attempt a repair install, and it stop errors, in NTFS.sys (gotta love how that driver covers FAT32 a well), about 30 minutes into the reinstall.
Play with that more, to the same result.
Do a clean reinstall, first to another partition, then deleting, and going over the prior partitions. Stop errors in NTFS.sys.
I've even disabled both RAID controllers on my motherboard, just in case, still NTFS.sys.
Think that maybe it's a fluke, and the NTFS.sys on the CD is bonked....
Grab Windows XP x64, and it errors out even later in the install, with a non-specific stop error, actually, one of three, including IRQ not less or equal (which always scares me deeply).
Next install of WinXP x64 goes on a clean/spare 160GB seagate IDE drive. It makes it to first reboot, then says that it can't find the operating system (missing, or damaged, two seperate error messages, I'll try to find their wording verbatim).
So...
I'm thinking it's either the RAM (always a chance), the IDE controller (but the CD-Rom does okay, and the HDD still errors on that channel).
This leaves me thinking that my best chance it to mount my SATA RAID-1 drives in this PC, verify their integrity, split the set, and make one of them my install drive for whichever OS gets put back on my box. (Probably XP x64)
The only things that are on this good box are installs of games I own, which is nice and easy to redo, the save files for GTA:SA, which I can save off of easily enough with this other PC I'm typing from, and copies of other documents, so it is fraggable, and not high-risk.
Thoughts, ideas, very simple easy things I've totally overlooked? Hope? Cheap/Easy ways of dealing with this problem, if indeed it is the IDE controller onboard (which is part of hte northbridge.... oh God, I hope it's not the NB). Can I RMA this to the Egg? Should I seek replacement under warantee from the Manufacturer? Am I out $150 for full functionality? Should I be banned from asking questions? Should I never post after 9pm at night once I've been drinking?
- Jones
(the thread can be referenced on [H] here)
However, all that's updated since that was first posted is that I had it working briefly by slapping the OS on an extended, rather than primary partition, but it started STOP erroring again, stop error is generally 0x8e.
ElaborateDream:
AMD64 X2 4400+
ASUS A8N-SLI Premium
ATI (BBA) X800XL PCI-Express
2Gb Corsair Value Select (2.5-4-4-8) PC3200
SBLive! 24-bit
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
dual WD 160GB SATA-II HDDs in RAID-1 on Nforce Controller
single Maxtor 80(60?)GB IDE HDD for booting.
So... Gaming along last night, 2am GTA:SA & Battlefield 2 joyousness. BF2 crashes to desktop, but oddly (even for BF2). Get a Windows message about d3d9.dll being screwy. Check DxDiag, and it's the DirectX 9.0 Direct 3D driver, as best I could tell, it's size was off, so I replaced it with a copy off my system backup. (no patches had happened in the meanwhile).
Reboot the system out of safe mode, and the OS loads. Kick up Trillian, and GTA. After 3 seconds of in-game play (rendered images, not menu) GTA dumps to desktop. System log tells me it was shut down to prevent damage to windows... Fire up BF2, and it dies after 2 minutes in game. As I'm looking at the details from that dumping, I get a stop error for NTFS.sys being screwy. Gotta love when the good stuff dies hard.
Reboot, make it into Windows fully, and it throws another Stop error after a few moments on the desktop.
Reboot yet again, and it's stop erroring as soon as it starts loading Windows.
Now, the fun part.
I'm in the reboot loop, preparing to hit F8, and a lighting strike hit the substation a bit downtown from me, the Rack-Grade surge suppressor took the hits just fine it seemed, but it wasn't until the third redundant transformer that one could handle the load. (so, power failure out at the transformer, that one bites it, next one tries & dies under load, same with the next, the last one, and I can hear this in my fountain across the room, and in my UPS'd system's fans (which scared me, as it was through a UPS) strains, browning out the power, and then rises to the challenge.
Check router and other connections, check breakers, everything seemed to have weathered.
Pop in 2k3 CD, attempt a repair install, and it stop errors, in NTFS.sys (gotta love how that driver covers FAT32 a well), about 30 minutes into the reinstall.
Play with that more, to the same result.
Do a clean reinstall, first to another partition, then deleting, and going over the prior partitions. Stop errors in NTFS.sys.
I've even disabled both RAID controllers on my motherboard, just in case, still NTFS.sys.
Think that maybe it's a fluke, and the NTFS.sys on the CD is bonked....
Grab Windows XP x64, and it errors out even later in the install, with a non-specific stop error, actually, one of three, including IRQ not less or equal (which always scares me deeply).
Next install of WinXP x64 goes on a clean/spare 160GB seagate IDE drive. It makes it to first reboot, then says that it can't find the operating system (missing, or damaged, two seperate error messages, I'll try to find their wording verbatim).
So...
I'm thinking it's either the RAM (always a chance), the IDE controller (but the CD-Rom does okay, and the HDD still errors on that channel).
This leaves me thinking that my best chance it to mount my SATA RAID-1 drives in this PC, verify their integrity, split the set, and make one of them my install drive for whichever OS gets put back on my box. (Probably XP x64)
The only things that are on this good box are installs of games I own, which is nice and easy to redo, the save files for GTA:SA, which I can save off of easily enough with this other PC I'm typing from, and copies of other documents, so it is fraggable, and not high-risk.
Thoughts, ideas, very simple easy things I've totally overlooked? Hope? Cheap/Easy ways of dealing with this problem, if indeed it is the IDE controller onboard (which is part of hte northbridge.... oh God, I hope it's not the NB). Can I RMA this to the Egg? Should I seek replacement under warantee from the Manufacturer? Am I out $150 for full functionality? Should I be banned from asking questions? Should I never post after 9pm at night once I've been drinking?
- Jones
(the thread can be referenced on [H] here)
However, all that's updated since that was first posted is that I had it working briefly by slapping the OS on an extended, rather than primary partition, but it started STOP erroring again, stop error is generally 0x8e.
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Farkin' stuff will run memtest for hours and hours, but as soon as I try to address it through windows, it blows up.
Corsair Value Select. : \
2047.0 to 2048.0 MB on the RAM, the 5th byte (000X0000) will ALWAYS return 0.
So, at least I can get the rest of it running for now.
Anyone know if my X2 processor can run dual-channel with mismatched DIMMs? (1.5GB worth of RAM on three DIMMs) ?