Help diagnosing problem

joeyjojo

joeyjojo

joeyjojo

Soldato
Joined
2 Dec 2005
Posts
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Location
Herts
It's funny being the one asking for help, but my trusty LGA 775 PC is having problems and I'd appreciate some thoughts. The key bits:

Gigabyte GA-G33M-DS2R
Xeon X3320 (AKA Q9300) at stock
4 GB Kingston HyperX
Asus GTX 560 Ti Twin Frozr II (previously a GTX 460, previously a GTX 260)
Corsair HX520W
2x Samsung HD753LJ 750 GB HDDs, one for OS and scratch, one for data
Windows Vista x64

The CPU and GPU are recent additions to get the machine to a decent performance level for games - the GPU went in this week and the CPU a few weeks ago. The rest of it is pretty original - the motherboard and PSU late 2007, the HDDs late 2008.

The problems began yesterday when the OS froze. I still had movement with the cursor but the window I had open went black and stopped responding. I pressed the restart case switch, but when Windows came up I got a BSOD, and unfortunately didn't have time to spot the error code. The next time I got as far as logging in, but the system again became unresponsive before completely loading up. I then turned it off and haven't switched it on since.

My first thought was a dying HDD - these disks have given me a long service (nearly 6 years) and I've seen strange problems like this with dying drives before. I have a copy of UBCD which has 3 different Samsung drive diagnostic tools on it but I couldn't get any of them to find the disks. Do I need to change something in the BIOS? Some kind of "legacy" options perhaps?

My second thought was the PSU. Again, long service and probably been pushing it recently with a GTX 460 and 560 Ti. But would that result in these kinds of symptoms?

I don't have any spares to swap out really, other than old GPUs.

Cheers in advance!
 
Thanks for the ideas everyone.

I managed to get a samsung drive tool to work, but thorough scans on both came back healthy.

I took the GPU out and the machine seems to be working fine (other than being stuck in 4:3 aspect ratio). I downloaded that bluescreen view program but it's only showing me a crash on 10 May which might be unrelated (in iaStor.sys). It's looking in C:\Windows\Minidump but there's only one file in there.

In the event viewer I've found the "previous system shutdown was unexpected" error (20:29 on 16/05). The only other vaguely interesting error I can find is on the next bootup (20:34). "The device, \Device\Ide\iaStor0, did not respond within the timeout period." Perhaps the cause of the freeze?

I think I'm going to try plugging the GPU back in.

Edit: a driver update sorted the onboard graphics out - now got native resolution and effects etc.
 
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Try a BIOS update, can help with these sorts of problems.

Or even simply unplugging the card and power connectors and re-plugging could have fixed it.
 
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