What went wrong?

[t33lo]

I installed vista RC2 a few weeks ago and everything ran fine. After about a week or so, I was getting some BSOD's and some random restarting so I though that there were still some leaks in vista and decided to uninstall it. Little did I know that something was actually wrong with my computer. Well anyways, I formatted my hd and installed xp pro on it. Already after about 1 day, I was already getting the BSOD's again. They were saying "Object1_Initialization_failed" I was almost certain that it was my memory so I did memtest 86 for several hours and it turned up no errors. After that, I decided to go back into my BIOS and restore the default settings. Doing so, I still got the same BSOD's. It gradually got worse with them happing within 5 seconds of booting up windows. I decided to format again. I put in the xp disc and when it was running through all the drivers and stuff it hung on ACPI EMBEDDED CONTROL DRIVER. I tried booting with the disc multiple times and it hung on the latter, as well as KERNELL DEBUGGER DLL. For HaHa's I tried running in safe mode and it stopped at ..../windows/system32/config/system.log. I also got the error once or twice saying "Windows failed to load becuase the system registry is missing, or corrupt." I've only had this computer for a little over a year.

3700+San Diego
DFI LANPARTY SLI DR
Crucial Ballistix 1G PC3200
WD Raptor
OCZ Powerstream 600W


Please help me

Thankyou.

 

[caamsa]

I't not exactly sure what those errors mean but it does not sound good. I have had similar things happen in the past and it was either the memory or hard drive failure. Did you test the hard drive?

 

[t33lo]

What is a good way to test the HD? I'm almost positive it's not the memory, CPU, or MOBO, so i guess that leaves it to the HD. If thats the case, its just over a year old. How could it crap out so fast?

 

[caamsa]

My experience is that they can go at any time. What brand of HD is it? Do you still have the software that came with the HD when you bought it? That usually has software on it for testing the drive. If not you will need to down load it from the internet.

 

[t33lo]

Its a 74 GB WD Raptor 10k rpm.. Didn't come with anything because I bought it OEM from Newegg. THinnk the manufacturer can replace it? Or because it was OEM, Im screwed? I thought there was some kind of warranty on them.

 

[bigsby]

Another thing you could do is download spinrite and burn it onto a cd (I believe it's too big for a floppy) and run that. It'll tell you if your hard drive is bad, as well as if it's in a condition that it can be restored, it'll fix it to as max an extent as it can, though I wouldn't trust it even if it DID fix it.

 

[caamsa]

I think most OEM's are still covered by a warranty. Would need to contact the company.

 

[t33lo]

ok so i bought a new hd a seagate 320 gb OEM and plugged it into my comp. When I put in the windows cd, I first formatted the drive using the full format, not the quick one. After that, I Put in the xp pro disc and it ran through all the devices and drivers with the blue background like it previously did. This time, however, it didnt' get stuck at kernell DLL or anyhthing like that. It ran perfectly through until it said ..."now loading windows" and then i get a BSOD that doesn't have any stop error it only says ***STOP :0x000007e, 0x3.... etc. What is going on? Do i need to rinstall my bios or what? I'm so confused

 

[WR]

Did you overclock?

I have noticed stock AMD chips already running at borderline dangerous temperatures in normal case configurations. As there is no on-chip thermal protection, I could imagine someone overvolting and then overclocking a CPU without monitoring temperatures would quickly damage the chip.

None of the original errors you pointed to are specific symptoms of failing memory or hard drive. They have nothing pertaining to memory, as they don't recur in the same spots. That would point to the motherboard (usually Northbridge) or the CPU.

I would RMA the CPU, re-install the chip, then try to install WinXP with stock settings. After that, I'd run Orthos blend to test the stress stability of the motherboard/RAM. If that passes, then you may learn something important about overclocking.

 

[endyen]

What kind of psu are you using, and what wattage?

 

[caamsa]

I had this happen on my sisters computer and I had to replace the mother board. I tried everthing and that was the only thing I could come up with that could have been at fault. I had an old board in the garage and used that and it loaded in and worked fine.

Also you can try installing it from dos. You ever do that? Use a windows ME boot disk (make sure you put smartdrive on it) go in use fdisk to format the drive. Then reboot. After you reboot at the A: dos prompt run smartdriv. Then go into your winXP CD rom and go to the I386 directory and then just type in winnt. Should run your XP disk from dos.

 

[t33lo]

Ok so I kept trying to install and it finally worked. No BSOD's yet, and it seems to be running fine. I do have a program to monitor the temps of the cpu and northbridge. The NB does get a bit high sometimes around 60*C and the cpu never reaches 50. No overclocking here.

 

[t33lo]

After about a week of installing the brand new HD, my computer is back to iteself again. I hardly even get BSOD's anymore, it will just give me an error in any program that I run for more than 2 mins and if i try to reopen it after it closes, my computer will just restart. Sometimes the computer will restart again before it even shows the windows loading screen. I guess it's pretty safe to say that it isn't the HD, its the MOBO or CPU. How can i test if its one or the other? I don't want to RMA the MOBO and come to find out that the problem lies within the processor. Also, If i do rma either the proccessor or the cpu, how should I send it in? I don't have any anti static bags. WHere could I get some. Thank you.

 

[gr8mikey]

I had a very similar issue problem about a year ago. It turned out to be the mainboard. It had some of those bad capacitors that you may have heard a lot about a couple years back. Visually inspect the capacitors on the mainboard and see if any of them appear to be swollen or leaking. Even if not the capacitors, I am 90% sure this is gonna be a mainboard issue at this point. I would have to say even with all my years of experience as a tech working in a retail store, I have never seen a cpu cause the problems you describe. Usually if a cpu goes bad, it goes 100% and the machine won't even post.