Boot Failure, BSOD then Reset

Soldato
Joined
26 Feb 2007
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Leafy Cheshire
Put togther the following parts last night:

Asus P5N32-E SLi Plus
2x 1gb Crucial Ballistix PC6400
Gainward BLISS 7900GS
Intel C2D E6300
Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro 7

Seated the motherboard, added the CPU, Heatsink, RAM, graphics card then seated the PSU, HDD, and Optical Drive. Everythign has its own PSU power connector. The board only suuports 1 IDE cable so ive run it with the mid-way conenctor to the HDD and the end connector to the Optical drive.

The PC powers up, the BIOS recognises 2048mb Ram, i can get temp's from the CPU. Everything is set to Auto, i've disabled all on board extra's and corrected the boot sequences.

Everything runs super fast but after it's done the initial bios checks (where it says
"X memory
Master Drive: Maxxtor blah blah
Slave Drive: Liteon blah blah
It goes to load windows, i very briefly see the Windows XP Pro screen with the progress bar but then it BSOD's and reset's. It resets too fast for me to be able to se what the error is, but i know BSOD generally relates to memory.

Ive pulled out one of the sticks of Ballistix out and tried booting with 1gb stick in each of the DIMM slots, then swapped the RAM with the other 1gb stick and tried that in each of the DIMM slots. Ive reseated the GFX card in the other PCIE slots. I've tried booting with 0 RAM.

The only other thing i can think to mention is that i havent done a fresh install of Windoze on my HDD. I literally just transferred it over. But that shouldnt be a problem right? it's just like changing a CPU, you dont need to reinstall... but im just changing some other stuff with it? Even then i tried booting with the XP CD in the optical drive and i didnt get past that initial BSOD as before.

But now that i sit here at work, im thinking: Would i get that BSOD at boot phase if my HDD is on the slave connector of the IDE cable but set to master by the jumper, and the optical drive which is on the end connector set to slave?

Ive tried to give as much info as possible. I've has some of these parts now for up to 2 months so even though they've sat in sealed boxes i dotn believe i can RMA them anymore?

Please help if you have any idea's whatsoever.
 
As soon as Windows starts to load hit the 'F8' key to bring up the advanced options. One of them is Prevent Auto Restart on System Failure. Select this and the PC should halt when it reaches the BSOD, giving you the opportunity to see it - might give you a clue as to where the fault lies.
 
DampCat said:
The only other thing i can think to mention is that i havent done a fresh install of Windoze on my HDD. I literally just transferred it over. But that shouldnt be a problem right? it's just like changing a CPU, you dont need to reinstall... but im just changing some other stuff with it? Even then i tried booting with the XP CD in the optical drive and i didnt get past that initial BSOD as before.

QUOTE]

you will almost allways need to ( and it's good practice ) to do a fresh install as your install of XP will have the wrong drivers set up for your new bits.

as for the XP CD where does it BSOD with that? You should get to the "do you want to install/ reinstall XP" blue screen - do you get to that?

Babyface
 
i dont get that, but again that may be something to do with my Optical Drive being sequenced wrong.

Ill be honest i was reluctant to reinstall as i didnt back anything up but i guess i'll give it a crack tonight! that's if i can get the system to not BSOD before it read's the CD.

Thanks Father Ted (great show btw) for the auto restart tip, i'll give that a bash aswell.
 
DampCat said:
i dont get that, but again that may be something to do with my Optical Drive being sequenced wrong.

Ill be honest i was reluctant to reinstall as i didnt back anything up but i guess i'll give it a crack tonight! that's if i can get the system to not BSOD before it read's the CD.

Thanks Father Ted (great show btw) for the auto restart tip, i'll give that a bash aswell.

set it up in bois to boot from CD first, do a fresh install and that should do the trick

Babyface
 
Ok, thanks for all the tips. PC is up and running and i've managed to get everything reinstalled.

Im a little worried about 2 things though:

The E6300 is running very hot indeed. 52c Idle and 62c under load. It has an AC Freezer 7 on it with AS5 sealing it. Is this likely to be a seating problem? Will re-seating the CPU help?

Also, I'm having issues with the SoundMAX card that makes up the on-board sound. When i run HL2 I only get sound from two channels on my 5.1 speaker system depending on which direction im facing, no matter what settings i choose in SoundMAX or HL2 itself. When I disabled the on-board audio in the Bios I got all sorts of funky BSOD errors, and the system would'nt allow me to install my Phillips card.

As a re-cap the board is a Asus P5N32-E SLi Plus.

Anyone got any ideas regarding these problems, as I'm worried about any long term damage these may cause.
 
shouldnt cause any long time damage but i would still get it sorted out, those temps sound way too high, i would reccomend a re-seat
 
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