System hangs

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by nugget, May 5, 2008.

  1. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    As most of you know I've been building my new pc. It seems now that I have a problem and it's driving me nuts not knowing where to look. The system hangs, just hangs, at any time. When I got the pc all set up I installed XP Pro. I then installed all the drivers needed for the motherboard and graphics card. I then went to install a game (crysis) and halfway through it hung itself. Reset, try again and the same result. I tried another game (stalker) with the same results.

    Even in safe mode it didn't want to go any further. I had applied all the updates to the system before trying to install the games so I thought it must be one of the patches that is making it hang. I re-installed the system, this time with XP Pro 64 bit without any updates. I tried to install a game and it went through without a problem. I then put on all the necessary drivers and some updates.

    The system still hangs. I tried installing the rest of the available updates and it hung itself 3 times at different areas and It also had problems installing some of the patches, something which I have rarely seen. After a little surfing tonight I went to type in a site name and when I pressed enter the whole screen went black and the system hung itself again.

    Now (after restarting yet again) and a little more surfing I left it for a short time and it has hung itself again (while doing nothing).

    Other things that I have noticed but may or may not be relevant:
    it boots faster with the secondary IDE disks plugged in than it does with the cd-rom plugged in
    for a quad core 2.66GHz I expected it to be "faster" more so than my Athlon XP 2600+ but it seems about the same
    all the hardware (see my sig for the specs) "seems" to be working according to the device manager and all the right drivers are there
    I flashed the bios with the most up to date version which added support for my cpu
    it is very slow to install anything


    Any time I do a search for anything about my components I come up mostly with reviews telling me how great they are. Any problems are usually related to overclockers having problems to get from 3.2 GHZ to 3.4 etc for the motherboard and cpu. There is nothing in the logs to give any clue either.

    Any help greatly appreciated.
     
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  2. greenbrucelee
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    Seems to me you have a bad bottleneck somewhere i'ts finding it thats the challenge.

    You don't happen to have one of the newest lines of Asus motherboard do you?
     
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  3. Bluerinse
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    Bluerinse Exabyte Poster

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    Do you have a SATA hard drive Nugg and if so was there a floppy with SATA drivers on it? You can get stuff like this happening sometimes with certain SATA controllers. try booting from a bootable OS like BartPE or Linux and giving it some burn in tests, disconnect the HDDs, my guess is it'll be fine.
     
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  4. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    I seem to have the latest models (released in the last couple of months) for all my components.

    The graphics card and mainboard were released around december (I think) and cpu last week.
     
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  5. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    It does have SATA disks but no floppy (not supplied any more). I haven't tried with a bootable disk yet. Any preferences to a distro that has some diagnosing capabilities included?

    EDIT: I know that sometimes I've needed to add drivers at the start of an install but I was surprised that the system found and recognised the disks and started installing like normal. It did take a lot of time changing between 'pages' of the start up routine (loading system files -> eula acceptance -> setup routine took roughly a minute between each step)
     
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  6. greenbrucelee
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    A friend of mine recently bought the Asus Striker extreme 2 mobo and he went to flash the bios, unfortuantely the bios update was faulty and he was getting system lockups anmd eventually his system wouldn't work. Asus replaced his mobo as it was their fault.

    If you have updated the bios I would check with Asus tech support to see if there is an issue with the updates for that particular board.
     
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  7. Mathematix

    Mathematix Megabyte Poster

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    Instead of guesswork, try looking at the event logs to see what is happening:

    Start -> Control Panel -> (Category View) Performance and Maintenace -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer

    See what it says when you go through each category. It should at least give you a very good clue. :blink

    Also, right-click on any warnings or error to read the full story with error codes that you can google.
     
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  8. greenbrucelee
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    good idea :)
     
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  9. Sparky
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    Sparky Zettabyte Poster Moderator

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    Is there a BIOS update available?

    Does the mobo support IDE devices? If so perhaps try installing on a IDE HD as it may be an issue with the SATA controller driver.
     
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  10. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    I've done it already. Most of it looks normal except for the warnings that relate to all the failed update installations.
     
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  11. Mathematix

    Mathematix Megabyte Poster

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    That's a problem. Why are they failing?
     
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  12. nugget
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    I have the latest bios update.

    The idea about installing on a IDE disk is good. I'll bring one home tomorrow. As with all modern creations, the old standard seem to be slowly phased out. This mobo has only one IDE connector so a little jiggery pokery will be required with the cables. :biggrin
     
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  13. Sparky
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    Sparky Zettabyte Poster Moderator

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    I had a similar problem with an old low spec server I was rebuilding, I installed the OS and it detected the SATA drives but the whole install was ‘slow’. After the install the server would blue screen, hang etc so I had to find the manufacturer’s pre-install disk which basically configured the SATA raid card with manufacturer’s driver. Problem solved! :biggrin

    If you try with an IDE drive and it works ok then it *looks* like an issue with the SATA drive, cable or driver. 8)
     
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  14. nugget
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    Most of them say (after following the codes) that the installation failed due to BITS being turned off (set to manual startup), I don't know how this happened or why. A bunch of others give the event ID 0.

    A whole bunch of the warnings relate to installing .net framework v2 (event id 0) Also, since when does IIS need to be installed as a pre-requisite to the framework being installed?


    This is what I mean by it's driving me nuts. There are so many little things for so many areas that I can't pin it down and I have to guess.

    A wild stab in the dark, could it be that XP Pro (as a client system) just has problems with the newest quad core cpus? Would a server system work any better as they are designed for multiple cpu usage?
     
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  15. Sparky
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    Does the CPU show up ok in device manager or does it say 'unknown'?
     
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  16. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    It shows up exactly as it should (all four of them :twisted: ).

    Same with the other components.

    Thanks for the IDE disk idea. I'll try it tomorrow and let you know how it goes. It's my only hope at the moment.
     
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  17. ffreeloader

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    This almost sounds like the problem Linux has with having multiple SATA drives in the system, and the root partition is not on an IDE drive. The solution in Linux is pretty simple though. All you do is label all the drives during the OS install and then edit /etc/fstab so the drives/partitions are referenced by label rather than by device. Then edit /boot/grub/menu.lst so that the root partition is looked for by label name rather than device name.

    This happens in Linux because the kernel doesn't know which partition is the root partition until it sees /etc/fstab to get device names, and /etc/fstab is on the root partition.

    Until you edit /etc/fstab the system will boot very inconsistently. It has to guess correctly as to which partition is the root partition, and when it doesn't guess correctly it won't boot. So, you just keep restarting the system until it guesses right and then do the edit. After that it all works like it should.
     
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  18. Mathematix

    Mathematix Megabyte Poster

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    Would need more details.

    About IIS being a prerequisite to .net framework 2, I couldn't answer because I don't know enough about web development.

    It appears to me to be a software issue. If you have the opportunity to install the OS again in your troubleshooting, don't install any drivers bar the graphics driver and use the PC in the same manner to see how it behaves.
     
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  19. Gaz 45

    Gaz 45 Kilobyte Poster

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    I'm fairly sure that if XP had problems with quad cores it would common knowledge by now ;)

    I'd try a clean install on the existing kit, but install the mobo SATA drivers (if you don't have a floppy with them on, they should be downloadable from Asus' website) when prompted before the install begins. If the same things happens, then try it on an IDE disk and/or test your disk data cables.

    After that, maybe you got some dodgy RAM? Tried an extended POST?
     
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  20. nugget
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    nugget Junior toady

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    OK this is now really getting on my nerves.

    I managed to make a floppy with the sata drivers on it and started to reinstall the system again. I loaded the drivers from the floppy as per instructions and it seemed to access the hdd a lot faster (faster switching between the config pages too). So, all going a little better than previously, or so I thought. Halfway through the install the system freezes and hangs itself. Bugger.:x

    So, determined as I am I changed the system around so I could install to an IDE drive. The install goes as usual until, bugger, it hung itself again.:x

    So, now I'm trying to install for the third time tonight. I've now connected one of the sata drives to a different connector to see if that will make a difference.
     
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