MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION

MattHaX · 10 May 2006 at 09:15

Hello,

I am currently receiving this error every so often. When the machine is rebooted the SATA hard drive is no longer detected in BIOS and the hard drive is still spinning normally, which I think means something is up with the hard drive. The optical PATA drive and floppy drive are detected normally, and so is every other piece of hardware. After switching the machine off at the power supply for around a minute makes the hard drive detectable again and everything works fine for the next day or two. Placing the hard drive on a differant SATA channel with a differant power and data cable still gives the same problem after a while. SMART status is not running at optimum condition too. I am also using default Windows x64 IDE drivers. The hard drive is about three to four years old and I think it may be seeing better days, but I am not really experiencing any data loss at all.

I am planning on buying new memory and a hard drive which I hope will rectify this problem and although it seems I have all the bases covered, I would like anyone's opinion on this problem hopefully putting my mind at ease.

Thank you.

Behemoth · 10 May 2006 at 10:45

I had this problem, it turned out to be my powersupply, although 550 watt, a cheap one, was unable to cope with the demands of my system. I bought a higher quality PSU and the problem resolved itself.

What power supply have you got as this is often the most over looked component, when in actual fact it's the most vital.

ChrisLX200 · 10 May 2006 at 12:41

Might be a bit slow spinning up (check the SMART parameter for that). There may be setting in your BIOS to allow a certain amount of time for the disks to spin up (time to boot). If there is increase it to about 4-5 secs to test.

MattHaX · 10 May 2006 at 14:38

Well, playing WoW earlier, the machine locked up (with sound looping) and when I rebooted the machine, the registry was damaged and I could no longer boot Windows. I put the HD in my older machine just to confirm that it wasnt a memory, cpu or cpu cache problem, because booting with faulty memory, cpu or cpu cache can cause that error, and the registry was still damaged, so files on the HD were damaged. I ran setup and tried to repair the drive and it found errors and repaired them. Rebooted the machine and Windows works again (for now, thank goodness!). So I came straight to OcUK and ordered a new HD and memory. I am 75% sure it's a HD issue and 25% sure it's a RAM issue.

Goods Shipped:
£139.95 x 1 - OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC3200 Dual Channel Platinum Series EL-DDR CAS2 (OCZ4002048ELDCPE-K) (MY-057-OC)
£50.95 x 1 - Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-018-SA)

I have always wanted to buy new memory and a HD before I even had these problems, but regardless, I hope either fix my problem, else I am up the creak without a paddle, especially because it is a Shuttle. If so, then I will consider the power supply (as suggested in the above two posts), chipset and finally *gulp* the processor.

Wish me luck. I'll post back with results.