- Aug 23, 2006
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- 18,510
If that's the problem, I'll gladly replace the power supply. I'll know soon when I try a lower end card in my system. In my experience, a poorly powered system will usually have weird, intermittent errors or spontaneous reboots rather than consistent failures. Of course, that may not always be the case. I'll post here tomorrow with the results, and hopefully some good news.
Thanks again to everyone who has responded.
Scott
Does not sound like a memory problem to mee, too.
Besides, memtest should have shown it, if it were.
Sounds like you are running into issues with the drives - I would focus on those, and their potential causes. I really have no experience with low power problems, but I would get a more powerful supply and plug it in before putting everything in the case. If that does not solve it, at least you would be able to return it. Also, if voltage makes no difference, I would leave it at the default - again, if it is a power related issue, you're only making it worse by cranking it up.
I would also second the opinions that the memory issues were affecting the new platform, and, more specifically, DDR2 RAM.
EDIT:
Which hard drive are you booting from? The SATA single or the PATA RAID? If RAID, check the boot order (duh, but just in case) and I am assuming you insalled the drivers (again, you shouldn't have gotten this far if you hadn't, but jsut in case).
Good luck
Besides, memtest should have shown it, if it were.
Sounds like you are running into issues with the drives - I would focus on those, and their potential causes. I really have no experience with low power problems, but I would get a more powerful supply and plug it in before putting everything in the case. If that does not solve it, at least you would be able to return it. Also, if voltage makes no difference, I would leave it at the default - again, if it is a power related issue, you're only making it worse by cranking it up.
I would also second the opinions that the memory issues were affecting the new platform, and, more specifically, DDR2 RAM.
EDIT:
Which hard drive are you booting from? The SATA single or the PATA RAID? If RAID, check the boot order (duh, but just in case) and I am assuming you insalled the drivers (again, you shouldn't have gotten this far if you hadn't, but jsut in case).
Good luck
DrBlofeld
Distinguished
- Apr 23, 2006
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Scotty,
Building upon the previous post. How many drives do you have on the system? If you have two or more then go to the BIOS options for booting from the hard drive. The BIOS has TWO levels of booting options. The first level is based on drive type, while the second level is the order for all drives of that type. Look at the boot order of ONLY the hard drives. The problem may be as simple as setting the hard drive boot order to the drive you intend to boot from within the HARD DRIVE boot order menu.
I had a similar issue where the boot order was DVD then hard drives. However, for the hard drives, it always lists my non-boot drive my default so I needed to change it.
This might be the solution to your problem. Please let me know if this works.
Building upon the previous post. How many drives do you have on the system? If you have two or more then go to the BIOS options for booting from the hard drive. The BIOS has TWO levels of booting options. The first level is based on drive type, while the second level is the order for all drives of that type. Look at the boot order of ONLY the hard drives. The problem may be as simple as setting the hard drive boot order to the drive you intend to boot from within the HARD DRIVE boot order menu.
I had a similar issue where the boot order was DVD then hard drives. However, for the hard drives, it always lists my non-boot drive my default so I needed to change it.
This might be the solution to your problem. Please let me know if this works.
- Aug 23, 2006
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- 18,510
Thanks for the suggestion but this had nothing to do with boot order. I was able to consistently configure which drives I wished to boot from. I'm about to post the "solution" to the problems. I still haven't established that the system is fully stable but so far it appears very promising.
Scott
Sonic_Reducer
Distinguished
- Feb 20, 2006
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you could use ALT+F8 at the post to enter the boot pop up window that asus bios has and choose the right drive you want to boot,
Have you tried a linux distro one of thoose cd things, only to see if it boots because if it does boot maybe there's something wrong other than the memory, because if it passes mem test and installs windows it must be good, because usually when memeory isn't working correctly the windows installation it crashes (for my experience there are expections), good luck with that weird prob.
Have you tried a linux distro one of thoose cd things, only to see if it boots because if it does boot maybe there's something wrong other than the memory, because if it passes mem test and installs windows it must be good, because usually when memeory isn't working correctly the windows installation it crashes (for my experience there are expections), good luck with that weird prob.
- Aug 23, 2006
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- 18,510
Hello again to everyone who has been helping me in this thread. I would like to thank everyone, yet again, for your helpful suggestions regarding this issue. Considering how many suggestions there were and how much time I spent on the problem over the last few days, I think it makes sense to post a lengthy “conclusion” to all of this. Hopefully it may help someone else running into similar problems in the future.
It is important to note that I was experiencing a combination of at least two issues that I have identified, which compounded the difficulty of narrowing down the problem.
First off, what didn’t work. Feel free to skip this section if you couldn’t give a rat’s a$$.
1. Changing the RAM.
Tried OCZ 2x512MB DDR400 Premium modules and Kingston 2x512MB DDR400 with no effect.
2. Changing the voltage to 2.7V.
Using the other memory ruled this out anyway, but I did try increasing the RAM voltage with no effect.
3. Switching between 1xMaxtor PATA, 1xSeagate SATA and 2xMaxtor PATA RAID 1. Although part of the solution is related to the number of drives in the system, simply using different drives and storage controllers did not resolve all of the problems. At the very least, the issue had nothing to do with the controllers or drives themselves.
4. Motherboard BIOS.
Although I did not try upgrading the BIOS, it appears that the latest released BIOS (1009) works fine.
5. 20 > 24 pin ATX adapter.
This seems to have nothing to do with the problems.
6. Leaving the Windows XP disc in the system.
This did not affect the booting problems.
7. Manually specifying ACPI Multiprocessor PC when starting the Windows XP installation.
Allowing the Windows installer to run without manually specifying multiprocessor seems to have no effect on the problems.
8. Using a different version of Windows XP.
I was originally trying to install Windows using a corporate edition copy but testing a retail copy made no difference. When I sat down and thought about this, I was convinced the problem was related to the lack of service packs in the original copy of Windows I was using. It turns out that SP2 didn’t make any difference. Still, I probably should have been using SP2 from the start.
Now on to what actually worked. Start here if you want to skip to the important part.
1. Disconnecting all but the necessary components and using a less power hungry video card.
I think Mondoman had this one pegged. When I have the 7900GT, Seagate and Maxtor drives connected all at once, the system fails to boot to ANY drive but the floppy. If I have just the Seagate drive and the 7900GT installed, it boots but it does not boot with three drives and the video card in combination. I had originally tried most of my installs without the Maxtor drives in the case but because of the problem in #2 below, I introduced them to test a different drive and the PATA controller. This is when I started seeing the failure to boot from the CD or hard drives. Granted that seems obvious to me now, but it wasn’t so obvious when I was running into the unmountable boot volume blue screens.
I’ll be picking a new PSU tonight and I’ll be looking for suggestions on what to buy. I’m not usually in the high end camp when it comes to power supplies so this is relatively new to me.
On to the first issue that started all of my problems and caused me to install the other drives into the system, resulting in the power issue.
2. Changing the nVidia storage controller driver floppy.
No, there was nothing wrong with my floppy drive or the disk itself (I tried a different disc just to be sure earlier on in my testing). The problem was that the make disk utility on the Asus CD that came with the board created a floppy that was missing the “nvata.cat”, “nvraid.cat” and “nvata.inf” files. What’s really weird is that I didn’t discover this was an issue until I had managed to install Windows many times without so much as a peep from the installer.
Last night I tried manually making a new disk from the nForce 6.86 driver package to see if the driver version could be causing problems and I started seeing errors about the missing files. (One of those, “if you’re installing from a CD or floppy blah blah files missing blah blah” messages.) I eliminated the possibility that it could be the drive and floppy disk so then I checked the disk itself and found that the files weren’t even there. (I realize now that I probably should have checked first, before trying another disk and drive. There’s half an hour I’ll never get back.)
When I copied all of the available files from the \NVIDIA\nForceWin2KXP\6.86\WinXP\legacy, \sata_ide and \sataraid folders onto the floppy, lo and behold, the missing file errors disappeared. Once I finally had managed to install Windows and boot into Windows in normal mode, I worked backwards to establish what the cause of all these problems were.
I actually solved these issues by removing all but the Seagate drive from the system, swapping in a new video card, and trying different version of Windows and the nVidia storage drivers. Then I started reintroducing the original software and parts. First the Windows disc turned out to make no difference. Then I tried the driver disc and found the problem in #2 above. Finally, I added the Maxtor drives back into the system and found the boot problem with the PSU in #1 above. There was no need to try the original video card as I knew that there was already a load problem even without it in the system.
I went back and forth twice between the original and new floppy disks with the nVidia drivers, just to be sure that I would get a blue screen using the disk with the missing files. At this point, I had only ever seen the missing file errors on the new disk but never once with the old disk. After a successful install using the new disk, I figured it must have been a version problem so I tried the old one. The old one gave me the unmountable boot volume error, so now back to the new disk. New disk worked again so I tried the old disk one last time and that’s the first time I saw the missing file errors on the old disk. Does this make any sense to you? It sure doesn’t make any sense to me but I tried continuing the installation without installing the files and saw my beloved unmountable boot volume blue screen. I think it’s safe to say that this is a missing files problem, not a version problem. Now I would love to know why I wasn’t always seeing an error about missing files, but I really don’t have the time to spend on it.
It’s safe to say that I’ve tried to install Windows on this system somewhere in the range of 40-50 times but I think I’ve got it nailed.
So now I’ve got a new problem. What PSU should I get for this system? 😀
Thanks again.
Scott
It is important to note that I was experiencing a combination of at least two issues that I have identified, which compounded the difficulty of narrowing down the problem.
First off, what didn’t work. Feel free to skip this section if you couldn’t give a rat’s a$$.
1. Changing the RAM.
Tried OCZ 2x512MB DDR400 Premium modules and Kingston 2x512MB DDR400 with no effect.
2. Changing the voltage to 2.7V.
Using the other memory ruled this out anyway, but I did try increasing the RAM voltage with no effect.
3. Switching between 1xMaxtor PATA, 1xSeagate SATA and 2xMaxtor PATA RAID 1. Although part of the solution is related to the number of drives in the system, simply using different drives and storage controllers did not resolve all of the problems. At the very least, the issue had nothing to do with the controllers or drives themselves.
4. Motherboard BIOS.
Although I did not try upgrading the BIOS, it appears that the latest released BIOS (1009) works fine.
5. 20 > 24 pin ATX adapter.
This seems to have nothing to do with the problems.
6. Leaving the Windows XP disc in the system.
This did not affect the booting problems.
7. Manually specifying ACPI Multiprocessor PC when starting the Windows XP installation.
Allowing the Windows installer to run without manually specifying multiprocessor seems to have no effect on the problems.
8. Using a different version of Windows XP.
I was originally trying to install Windows using a corporate edition copy but testing a retail copy made no difference. When I sat down and thought about this, I was convinced the problem was related to the lack of service packs in the original copy of Windows I was using. It turns out that SP2 didn’t make any difference. Still, I probably should have been using SP2 from the start.
Now on to what actually worked. Start here if you want to skip to the important part.
1. Disconnecting all but the necessary components and using a less power hungry video card.
I think Mondoman had this one pegged. When I have the 7900GT, Seagate and Maxtor drives connected all at once, the system fails to boot to ANY drive but the floppy. If I have just the Seagate drive and the 7900GT installed, it boots but it does not boot with three drives and the video card in combination. I had originally tried most of my installs without the Maxtor drives in the case but because of the problem in #2 below, I introduced them to test a different drive and the PATA controller. This is when I started seeing the failure to boot from the CD or hard drives. Granted that seems obvious to me now, but it wasn’t so obvious when I was running into the unmountable boot volume blue screens.
I’ll be picking a new PSU tonight and I’ll be looking for suggestions on what to buy. I’m not usually in the high end camp when it comes to power supplies so this is relatively new to me.
On to the first issue that started all of my problems and caused me to install the other drives into the system, resulting in the power issue.
2. Changing the nVidia storage controller driver floppy.
No, there was nothing wrong with my floppy drive or the disk itself (I tried a different disc just to be sure earlier on in my testing). The problem was that the make disk utility on the Asus CD that came with the board created a floppy that was missing the “nvata.cat”, “nvraid.cat” and “nvata.inf” files. What’s really weird is that I didn’t discover this was an issue until I had managed to install Windows many times without so much as a peep from the installer.
Last night I tried manually making a new disk from the nForce 6.86 driver package to see if the driver version could be causing problems and I started seeing errors about the missing files. (One of those, “if you’re installing from a CD or floppy blah blah files missing blah blah” messages.) I eliminated the possibility that it could be the drive and floppy disk so then I checked the disk itself and found that the files weren’t even there. (I realize now that I probably should have checked first, before trying another disk and drive. There’s half an hour I’ll never get back.)
When I copied all of the available files from the \NVIDIA\nForceWin2KXP\6.86\WinXP\legacy, \sata_ide and \sataraid folders onto the floppy, lo and behold, the missing file errors disappeared. Once I finally had managed to install Windows and boot into Windows in normal mode, I worked backwards to establish what the cause of all these problems were.
I actually solved these issues by removing all but the Seagate drive from the system, swapping in a new video card, and trying different version of Windows and the nVidia storage drivers. Then I started reintroducing the original software and parts. First the Windows disc turned out to make no difference. Then I tried the driver disc and found the problem in #2 above. Finally, I added the Maxtor drives back into the system and found the boot problem with the PSU in #1 above. There was no need to try the original video card as I knew that there was already a load problem even without it in the system.
I went back and forth twice between the original and new floppy disks with the nVidia drivers, just to be sure that I would get a blue screen using the disk with the missing files. At this point, I had only ever seen the missing file errors on the new disk but never once with the old disk. After a successful install using the new disk, I figured it must have been a version problem so I tried the old one. The old one gave me the unmountable boot volume error, so now back to the new disk. New disk worked again so I tried the old disk one last time and that’s the first time I saw the missing file errors on the old disk. Does this make any sense to you? It sure doesn’t make any sense to me but I tried continuing the installation without installing the files and saw my beloved unmountable boot volume blue screen. I think it’s safe to say that this is a missing files problem, not a version problem. Now I would love to know why I wasn’t always seeing an error about missing files, but I really don’t have the time to spend on it.
It’s safe to say that I’ve tried to install Windows on this system somewhere in the range of 40-50 times but I think I’ve got it nailed.
So now I’ve got a new problem. What PSU should I get for this system? 😀
Thanks again.
Scott
- Aug 23, 2006
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- 18,510
Yeah man, thanks for the help. The really infuriating thing about this is that I went into Canada Computers before all of these problems with the intention of buying a new PSU and the guy there convinced me that all I should get was the 20 to 24 pin adapter. I should have known better than to listen to the sales rep (despite his usually sound advice), so I really have no one to blame but myself. Still, I was holding a new PSU in my hand and I put it back. Now I'll have to go back... ARGH!
Scott
Dude, I just bought all the hardware listed on my signature. I spoke with OCZ after my failed attempt at booting my system. OCZ's Technical support manager acknowledged that they do have problems with ASUS 965 chipsetted mobos. His info is listed below:
"Sean Kumar Sinha
Senior Technical Support Representative
Phone: (408) 733-8400 ext. 461
Fax: (408) 733-5200
Email: sean@ocztechnology.com
OCZ Technology"
I've now been waiting over 7 days for my memory which I had RMA'd back to them. I didn't bother returning the new memory back to ZipZoomFly.com because they wanted to charge me a 25% restocking fee, plus I have to pay for my own shipping. So instead, I went the RAMing route, I still haven't been able to power up my newly built system, because I'm waiting, waiting, waiting for OCZ. I just got in contact with Mr. Sinha yesterday via e-mail & he said that their RMA dept. is sooooo backed up that they hadn't even begun to process my RMA'd RAM. Waiting since 08-24-2006. Good luck. I know from where & from who I won't be buying anymore anything even if the sales are good. Now I have to go out & buy a cheapo stick from someone locally just to turn on my new system.
- Aug 23, 2006
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- 18,510
Man, I'm really sorry to hear you're having these problems. It sounds like the issues with compatibility only apply to the AM2 platform, which is good for me and bad for you. Why not just borrow a DIMM from a friend to get this going? Surely someone at work or school would have one you could borrow for a few minutes, even if you have to bring your system to their place.
I was dealing with Sean at OCZ and he was very helpful. Eric has also made a lot of effort to help me out with a problem that turns out isn't even related to RAM. Of course, when I start overclocking, I may see some new issues with my platform.
Good luck.
Scott
- Aug 23, 2006
- 20
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- 18,510
I'm not sure if this is acceptable to continue with these questions in this thread so let me know if you think I should start a new thread in another forum.
OK, here are some available PSU choices:
Antec TruePower Trio 550W/650W (3x12V rails)
Can't find any full reviews.
OCZ GameXtreme 600W/700W (4x12V rails)
Review:
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/cases/OCZ_GameXStream_700W_1.html
Enermax Liberty 500W/620W (looks to be 2x12V rails)
Review:
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/cases/Enermax_ELT620AWT_7.html
I'm leaning toward the OCZ 700W or the Antec 550W, but that's only because they're both in stock today. Does anyone have a particular recommendation as far as brand and/or total wattage? Since I'm only ever going to have one graphics card (although it is a power hungry card) in this system, would 550W be safe? I figured my 480W would do the trick, and it probably would have, had the 12V been capable of a higher amperage, as Mondoman pointed out. I am planning to overclock to the 240MHz FSB range so that will obviously increase the load on the PSU slightly.
Thanks.
Scott
OK, here are some available PSU choices:
Antec TruePower Trio 550W/650W (3x12V rails)
Can't find any full reviews.
OCZ GameXtreme 600W/700W (4x12V rails)
Review:
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/cases/OCZ_GameXStream_700W_1.html
Enermax Liberty 500W/620W (looks to be 2x12V rails)
Review:
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/cases/Enermax_ELT620AWT_7.html
I'm leaning toward the OCZ 700W or the Antec 550W, but that's only because they're both in stock today. Does anyone have a particular recommendation as far as brand and/or total wattage? Since I'm only ever going to have one graphics card (although it is a power hungry card) in this system, would 550W be safe? I figured my 480W would do the trick, and it probably would have, had the 12V been capable of a higher amperage, as Mondoman pointed out. I am planning to overclock to the 240MHz FSB range so that will obviously increase the load on the PSU slightly.
Thanks.
Scott
I just got a Silverstone 600W, after my Thermaltake 680W failed after 12 mos of operation. So far, so good. And I liked the modular connectivity. And these seem to be pretty good PSUs overall.
I would suggest checking the PSU section of these boards for plenty of good PSU discussion. Caution - it would seem that you have to be a lot more careful with higher powered units, as there seem to be a lot of them failing, based on neweggs' feedback. If you can trust newegg's feedback, anyway...
I would suggest checking the PSU section of these boards for plenty of good PSU discussion. Caution - it would seem that you have to be a lot more careful with higher powered units, as there seem to be a lot of them failing, based on neweggs' feedback. If you can trust newegg's feedback, anyway...
Ok I know this is an old post but I just built a new sandy bridge system with an says p8p67 with 8 gigs of ocz ddr3 ram with 4x2gig modules. At first had trouble getting to post then once I finally got OS up and running it would only recognize 4gigs of the ram in slots 1 and 2 when running windows memory diagnostic tool it said I had problems and to contact the manufacturer. But I eventually got the rig to recognize all 8 gigs until I unplugged it and when I restarted it would still only recognize 4 gigs in windows and in the bios. So I returned the crappy OCZ and got some xms3 corsair memory and it works perfectly. And on a sidenote Just today OCZ decided to pull out of the RAM business! Thank god. Due yourself a favor and don't buy that high voltage gimmicky OCZ ram. Especially since they are probably not going to give you much support
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