I hope someone can help me with thi

[2frustrated]

I hope someone can help me with this.

I've been having a weird problem with Windows 2000 during the last 3 days. Even though I'm trying to save as much as possible from my hard drive, I'm facing a loss of some relatively important information, and a full reformatting and reinstallation of the OS, so any advise that can help me avoid this, or at least help stop this happenning in the future, will be greatly appreciated.

A little background info: I'm running Windows 2000 Professional on a Pentium 4, 1700MHz (overclocked to 1800MHz), Intel motherboard, ATI All-In-Wonder 128 Pro graphics card. This system has been working just fine for about 5 months. Two days ago, after my monitor went into the power-saving mode, I couldn't turn it back on - neither by moving the mouse, nor by pressing any of the keys. The only option I had was resart the computer. After a restart, the computer went through a POST routine, the Loader (the bar at the bottom of the screen showing progress), the splash screen with the Windows 2000 Professional logo, the little window with blue squares filling from left to right showing the loading process - and then... just when it was about time for the system to completely load and show me the log-in window, the screen went black and the system froze. Another restart didn't help - same thing. Restarting in the safe mode didn't help - it went just a tiny little bit further, switching to the colored desktop instead of a black screen, with a window saying "loading windows", or something like that, and a bar changing its color from white to blue to indicate that some process is in progress, but this process lasts forever and the system doesn't load anyway. I've tried to recover the system from setup - didn't help. I've tried reinstalling the whole OS in the same folder, over the existing one - after 2-3 restarts, it gets to the same problem.

I have noticed (although it may be a pure coincidence) that this crash usually occurs when I try to change from default (640 x 480 x 16) screen resolution to something higher, installing the original ATI drivers. The system has to restart after the video drivers are installed, and after such a restart I get this black screen again. I doubt the drivers are corrupted, since they are on an official CD, and I've used them all those 5 months with no problem. Another thing I don't understand - if it's a matter of a corrupt file, or something - why then a new installation of the OS, which supposedly should overwrite hypothetically corrupt old versions of the files, doesn't solve the problem? I'm now trying to back up whatever I need on a CD-R, after a new OS installation - that's the only thing I can do with 640 x 480 x 16 resolution without losing my mind, but, again, I think I'm facing a complete reformatting of the HD and a new installation of the OS.

It maybe that the video driver is not the problem, since it works fine in the default post-installation mode, and even allows me to change to 800 x 600 x 16 resolution (but I don't see anything higher in the option window - I thought that higher resolutions should be available even if I don't install ATI video drivers, since Windows should detect my hardware and install Microsoft's video driver at least initially, to support at least 1024 x 768 resolution - am I wrong?)

Anyway, this is a really weird problem and I really don't know whether this is a hardware or a software problem or a combination of both. I personally doubt that this is a hardware problem, since in that case the problem won't go away after a reinstallation of the system. A software problem, on the other hand, should have been solved by overwriting old files during reinstallation, which, again, is not the case - I'm completely lost.

I'm sorry if the question has already appeared in any of the threads (I couldn't find the answer here)- in this case I would appreciate a link to such a thread.

Thanks in advance

 

[wolluf]

Try removing the overclocking.

 

[Eguy]

2frustrated

I second wolluf's suggestion. By overclocking you are delibrately introducing instabilities. Don't try to trouble shoot anything until you are running at spec. A 1700 mhz processor bumped up 100 mhz? Not worth it in my book.

Ed Please let me know if the suggestion(s) I provide are helpful to you.
Sometimes you're the windshield... Sometimes you're the bug.

 

[2frustrated]

I will try to, but I repeat - I've been working very intensively (almost 24 hours a day) with the overclocked processor for about 5 months with no problems at all. Besides, I'm now 95% sure that it's because of the video drivers, but I'm still can't understand why the new installation of both the OS and the videodrivers can't cure it.

I had the problem repeat yesterday - I've gone through something like 10-15 restarts in the default 640 x 480 x 16 and 800 x 600 x 16 display modes - nothing happened. As soon as I installed ATI's video drivers and had to restart the computer for the changes to take effect - I got the black screen instead of the log-in window. I restarted in the safe mode and got to the "windows is starting up..." dialog but no further. But the weirdest thing was this - I changed my BIOS to boot from CD (again) and put the bootable windows 2000 CD in the CD-ROM. I restarted the PC. I got distracted and missed the "Press any key to boot from CD..." dialog, so I suppose PC booted from the hard disk again (with the bootable CD in the tray, though). Surprise, surprise - it booted up OK, and all ATI drivers were now properly installed. I haven't restarted the PC since then (actually, I'm afraid to), but this sudden change of behavior surprised me very much. Whenever I finish the back-up of important data and some other things that I don't want to lose from my HD, I'm going to try restarting it several times more and see what happens. But it's the video drivers, I'm sure.

Another question, a little unrelated to the first one - I've been examining the cabling inside my PC to see if that could be the problem, and introduced some changes (in particular, I've noticed that my ATA100 hard disk was not connected to the motherboard with the 80-pin connector cable, the latter was used to connect DVD-ROM and CD-RW, whereas the HD was connected using the regular 40-pin cable) to boost performance and noticed another weird thing:

at present my HDD is connected as a Master on a primary IDE channel. My DVD-ROM is connected as Master and CD-RW is connected as Slave on a secondary IDE channel. The weird thing is that both DVD-ROM and CD-RW seem to work OK, they easily read the CDs, can open text files on those CDs, browse through the directories, etc. But when it comes to executables, they cannot start from a DVD-ROM connected as Master, giving me the "cannot initialize the .exe... program will be terminated", or "can not reference 0x0000XXx", or something similar. They execute perfectly from a disk in CD-RW drive, though. When I switch them and configure the CD-RW as a Master and DVD-ROM as a slave - both drives work OK and executables can start from both of them. What the hell?

Appreciate all of your replies.

 

[wolluf]

Until you run without overclocking...

My machine at home is an 800mhz Duron. I can overclock it. If I set it to run at 840, it will usually boot (anything above 840 and PC boots but no o/s will load), but often get strange error (looks like corrupt system file) while booting. At 832, boots 90% of the time - usually runs ok, but sometimes problems. Have run it at 824 for months with no problems - but then get something odd happening. At 800 it just runs - no problems - so I don't overclock it any more!

 

[Spirit]

I am currently having the EXACT same problem with a friends PC. I thought the ATI card was an ATI Pro 128 or something like that but its actually a Rage something or other.

Check the ATI website and the serial number on your card to make sure your uising the right drivers.

It sounds insulting but I tried everything and then "whoops!".

 

[DRendar1978]

2Fustrated...

Remember that when you force the FSB higher to Overclock your processor, you are also overclocking your AGP and PCI slots... In my experience ATI's do not like to be overclocked, and as Eguy said, with just 100 extra MHz on a 1.7Gig CPU, Are you really going to gain any benefit?

BTW, I don't know where you live, but if the weather there has got hotter recently due to Summer or Spring, then that could explain why it was working Fine before in the winter or autumn...

Hope you get it working!
--

Dash
"I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every Minute!!!!!"

 

[Cadwalader]

2frustrated,

Lose the overclocking and the graphics card. If it's and AGP card, and it's gone bad, it could be filling the memory with crap really fast and halting the mobo. If it's a PCI (which for the readers that would ask, "why would anyone have a 128MB card in a PCI slot?" I say it's a P4 and it uses a "quad-pumped" 133MHz FSB to achieve a 533MHz FSB...so a PCI card is almost like it's an AGP) card and it's bad, it could be hogging up the FSB and stopping the CPU dead in it's tracks.

The first thing I would do is uninstall the graphics card and use the monitor out on the mobo.

Oh yeah, check the CPU fan, amke sure the heat sink is securely attached with thermal grease, make sure the heat sink is clean, etc. Believe it or not, your CPU will hit shutdown temp during startup. It can happen that fast.

..hope this helps

--Rich

 

[2frustrated]

Thanks everybody for your replies.

I'll try to refrain from overclocking. I actually rounded off the figures , originally it is Pentium 4 with 1.7 GHz, and it was overclocked to 1.86 GHz. I'll set it back to 1.7GHz in the evening, when I get back from work and see what happens. I may not be gaining much with additional 160 MHz, but since I'm dealing a lot with digital video conversions, I need a fast computer and a little overclocking may save me 4-5 frames per second conversion time. I would have overclocked it more, if I wasn't afraid to nuke the processor, this was my first experiment in overclocking anyway so I decided to give it a little try. Apparently, it might have turned out a failure, we'll see.

Anybody has an answer for my second question on why doesn't DVD-ROM work normally as a master drive?

 

[wolluf]

Check out the DVD problem with overclocking turned off - its also the sort of thing it can produce.

 

[Cadwalader]

To all,
Ya know what? After I posted my response this moring, I restarted my PC. Guess what happened next? It restarted, and restarted, and restarted...

It gets to where the screen should go to the log in, but it just restarts. NAV Rescue disks are not going to do any good because my floppy drive is dead.

I guess the joke of the day is on me! :-(

(I am not in any way insinuating that posting in this forum had anything to do with my crash.)

I have been downloading a lot of stuff and maybe I got a boot virus. I don't know how to fix it when it's this bad.
So after I replace the floppy drive (I'll probably stop by Staples on the way home and get one), is there anything I could try?

--Rich