What have I done...?! Oh noeessss!!

Darg

Darg

Darg

Soldato
Joined
6 Sep 2006
Posts
6,302
Location
London
Okay first of all this is my computer atm as I am spraying my case and modding it here and there:
DSC06055.jpg


Now the other night I was using my big monitor and other speakers to watch a movie. This involved switching sound cables around, when I went to put them back it was around 4am, anyway long story short I ended up pulling the soundcard slightly out of the PCI card. Enough to make my PC freeze and that terrifying buzzing noise come over the speakers.

Anyway I turn off computer immediately, put card back in, turn machine back on and it seems to work okay. Go to play wwiio and I keep getting CTDs every 5-10 minutes. Annoying. I think okay probably the drivers got borked. So I reinstall then. Didn't help.

Yesterday morning then I give the drivers a full uninstall (with DCPro) and reinstall. Yay game seems to work okay. Now however I'm getting random BSODs while just running windows. Errors, if there are any shown are like DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL which indicates a driver or hardware problem. To make sure it's not my overclock I'm re-running Orthos DC and it's around 25min in without a problem, CPU @ 3.15, RAM at 900 C4. For good measure I've got WMP playing random music in the background. No crashes yet so they appear to be completely random.

What had me worried just there was that the sound randomly cut out for 10 seconds. WMP player was still playing, tried pausing, unpausing, tried testing sound by changing volume on the system tray, no beep, oh **** I thought. Then sound popped back on.

So I'm thinking.. sound card borked? Motherboard borked? BTW it's an old Audigy 2 which I've had and loved for years. Apart from my DVD drive it's the oldest thing in my PC.

Please tell me I haven't broken it :o

I'm thinking I may need to reinstall windows but I really really don't want to go through that hassle.
 
Do you get the errors without the card installed in the slot? have you tried the sound card in a different slot?

It's more likely to be a hardware problem so you should eliminate that first
 
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Thanks guys I'm scanning the hdd now. I haven't tried it without the soundcard. If I keep getting them I'll try swapping PCI slots with the wireless card and if that doesn't work I'll try it without the soundcard altogether.

EDIT: Upon completing phase 2 of scan disk it came up with "Windows is unable to complete the disk check". eep?

Should I format the drive and reinstall windows?
 
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If you have nothing to lose on that drive, then yes. Otherwise, use Knoppix (Linux on a disk) or other recovery software, copy the contents, then reformat.

Alternatively, replace the drive so you have a working PC up and running (depending what costs you more, a new HD or your PC out of commission), reinstall windows and recover the contents at your leisure
 
I am using an 80GB IDE drive as my windows partition atm and a 500GB WD AAKS drive for data. Luckily I thought ahead and partitioned the 500GB into 200, 200, and 65GB chunks. For data, games and a spare in case I needed to reinstall windows on it :)

I'll just reinstall on the spare drive.
 
I've had random crashes like that on entering my desktop. Exactly the same error. It usually happens if I start running programmes before the thing's fully loaded up on desktop. It's quite sporadic on my machine and not quite irritating enough to fix it (besides, it's 4 years old and getting replaced next month). I did do a little investigation, heard it's possibly power or RAM related but don't quote me on that. Also I've been incredibly lazy and my version of XP has gone through two different motherboards (Athlon 1.2 then Athlon 64) and two operating systems (Win98 upgraded to XP) which I never bothered to reinstall properly. Might have something to do with it.
 
My laptop died of irq not less or equal last night... i thought that was just one of these crashes that nobody could pinpoint why... how did you find out its hardware related?
 
craig_kennedy83 said:
My laptop died of irq not less or equal last night... i thought that was just one of these crashes that nobody could pinpoint why... how did you find out its hardware related?
Click to expand...

Google :)

It was a bit of a coincidence as well that it started after nudging the PCI card out.

Formatted and reinstalling windows now.
 
Darg said:
EDIT: Upon completing phase 2 of scan disk it came up with "Windows is unable to complete the disk check". eep?

Should I format the drive and reinstall windows?
Click to expand...


Normally when I get that message pop up in xp, it runs a full disc check next time it's re-started.........and fixes the problem.
 
slowrunner said:
Normally when I get that message pop up in xp, it runs a full disc check next time it's re-started.........and fixes the problem.
Click to expand...

Hrm, well I've reformatted and going through all the driver/software installation. So much crap.. sp2, .NET 2.0, before I can even install ATi drivers. :rolleyes:
 
Ach noooo.. all that time formatting and reloading everything for nothing :(

Going to try another scandisk to see if the disk is physically damaged.

EDIT: Well scandisk is onto phase 4 which is further then it got (phase 2) before crashing and dying before.

After this I guess the only thing left to do is use the onboard sound. If that doesn't work then I've probably borked my mobo :(

Such a stupid mistake too... gar..
 
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A friend had the same thing, I could not get it fixed, system also found errors with a disk check but the BSOD remained, she took the system to a PC shop and they said the mobo was borked, after she got a new mobo the system works fine.
 
Luckily it seems to have fixed itself for now. I haven't had a BSOD since I reinstalled windows. After I swapped my sound card and my wireless card around there hasn't been a crash in game.

That seems to indicate some problem with that PCI slot, so far I haven't put the wireless card to much use. I use it for sharing internet and networking with the other PC but we only use that one for TV mainly. Don't know if it'll cause problems or not. As long as I can play my games I'm happy :)
 
perhaps to be on the safe side. you can disable it in bios (?) or device manager (?)( the pci slots which you are concerned with)
 
Okay, well I thought this was fixed until last night it kicked up again. Very annoying as it had worked for 3 days without problem. I took out the sound card and installed the onboard sound drivers. FPS in wwiio has nigh on halved and sounds keep popping in and out so I'm not so happy with it but it's stopped the game from turning off. Just ran memtest86 for 1hr 40min this morning with no errors so I think I can rule out the RAM. Gonna leave orthos running for a while this afternoon too just to rule out the overclock.

Sadly I think it is the sound card, that means I can't use my gameport joystick either as the P5N-E Sli has no gameport connection on the board. I'm looking at the X-Fi Music OEM but with postage it'll come to around €100 :(
 
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