kingv Posted October 31, 2006 Share Posted October 31, 2006 Athlon XP 2200, Antec Sonata, ASUS V9480TVD, Seagate Barracuda. Built the system about 2 years ago and the first year was trouble free. Started experiencing random reboots where the BSOD was visible for a split-second. WinXP, in it's infinite wisdom, reported the problem as an unknown device driver error. Tried some minor troubleshooting. Pulled the sound card in favor of onboard, then disabled onboard, etc. Over time, the error frequency steadily increased until the system was practically unuseable. It takes about 60 seconds to get from the end of the POST to the WinXP screen. After one failure, WinXP decided the error was caused by the drivers for the ASUS video card. When I tried installing drivers from ASUS, the upgrade failed, returning the message...A parameter is incorrect. That was helpful. Tried swapping the video card out with a TNT2 M64 card. Same failure installing drivers. Somewhat satisfied that my video hardware is OK and fairly annoyed with Windows, I booted Knoppix (5.1 I think it was). The boot was clean and once KDE loaded, I ran dmesg in a terminal session. Everything looked OK. Went into the KDE InfoCenter and started kicking hardware. Everything there was OK until I ran the IO Ports test. The app crashed. I ran dmesg again and got an oops this time. A friend who's a Hardware Engineer interpreted the results for me as..."the system was trying to access memory-mapped IO in the motherboard hardware range and got a response it couldn't resolve"... Pulled all 3 XMS3200 512 sticks and booted Knoppix with one stick at a time. Two of the sticks booted OK, though the IO Ports error was still reproducable. One stick wouldn't boot at all causing a kernel panic. I was advised that even though the one stick wouldn't boot, it wasn't necessarily bad. It could be at the edges of it's latency spec and a questionable memory controller may not be able to deal with it. Back to Windows. Re-installed original video card. Looked for a BIOS upgrade that addressed memory issues. Upgraded BIOS to ver 1.09 I think it was. No difference. Windows would boot successfully maybe one time in 20, so I was unable to boot each stick individually as I had in Knoppix. Changed BIOS setting for memory frequency from SPD to Auto, Windows found new hardware. PCI memory, and nVidia memory controller which it installed succesfully. Still can't load video drivers for any card I try. My gut feeling was that I had some sort of hardware failure seemingly independant of the OS so I RMA'd the board back to ASUS. They're telling me the board is A-OK. Now I'm here. All memory was purchased through ZipZoomFly, though I can't locate the receipt for one of the sticks. Set up interim tower, ASUS video card confirmed healthy. I have no other system that I can use as a test pig for the memory. Would like to send all sticks back for proper testing but will follow any guidance you may have once I get the board back from ASUS. Thanks very much for your time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted October 31, 2006 Share Posted October 31, 2006 Can you reset CMOS and then test each module individually with Memtest. Leave all settings at MOBO defaults except the memory voltage, set this to the 2.7v to 2.8v range. Also, I missed it in your post. Did you try the clean install of Windows with only 2 DIMMs, and omitting the suspect DIMM? Thanks, Mike. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kingv Posted October 31, 2006 Author Share Posted October 31, 2006 Thanks for your reply Mike. When I get the board back, I can try the CMOS reset and memtest runs....if I can get a clean boot. I didn't bother with a Windows refit because I was able to detect seemingly related hardware problems in Linux. Most of the affected modules listed in the call trace were agp related. That, and the reproducability of the error in Linux when booting only one stick at a time led me to believe there was nothing to be gained. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kingv Posted November 2, 2006 Author Share Posted November 2, 2006 Got the board back from ASUS today. Although I had upgraded the BIOS to 1009, they upgraded it to the latest version, 1010. Looked at the memory voltage and it was set to 2.6 <BIOS reccomendation was to leave it at 2.6> so I changed it to 2.7, <could have set it to 2.8, which is best?>, and let it rip. What a difference a tenth of a volt makes. The system boots clean first time every time. I'm not outta the woods yet, but this is very, very encouraging. This goes a long way in explaining why I was seeing failures regardless of OS. If the rest of the testing goes well, a windows refit should wrap this up. More on that in the next few days. For anyone out there who hasn't heard of or used Knoppix, I would strongly reccomend giving it a try. It's a full blown Linux distro w/GUI on a bootable cd and it's free. It's a very nice tool for windows post-mortem/hardware troubleshooting work. I've used a Knoppix cd and a flash drive several times for data recovery on systems that will no longer boot windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yellowbeard Posted November 2, 2006 Share Posted November 2, 2006 2.8v is perfectly safe and within warranty on that memory so, if you want, you can go to 2.8v. In fact, it's probably a good idea with 3 DIMMs. And, yes it is odd what a difference .1v can make. Thanks for the tip, I may investigate Knoppix and add it to my arsenal. I know virtually NOTHING about Linux but it's about time to learn some I guess. I just got a Linux based firewall but, it is all GUI based so I may not learn much just with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kingv Posted November 22, 2006 Author Share Posted November 22, 2006 Well, the good news is that changing the DDR reference voltage to 2.8v stabilized the system, and the WinXP refit completed normally. Although I haven't tested each module individually, I ran memtest for 20 hours, 17 iterations of the 10 standard tests were executed and no errors were found. Also, I was able to boot each module in Knoppix. Now the bad news. My ASUS video card, which behaved as expected when installed in the interim tower regardless of driver version, does not behave as expected. I can only get the video-in to work if I use older drivers. Also, some schlepping through event viewer after the OS refit has revealed the same error I originally found using Knoppix...An input/output (I/O) request to a memory-mapped file failed. This same I/O error is still reproducable in Knoppix as well. I suspect this might have happened when I was trying to watch the Yellowbeard DVD...<You again!?!?>...and could get no audio output whatsoever, though other DVD's play without a problem. The system is stable now, which is a big plus, but it's still not right. For the record, the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 was re-installed before the OS refit. All other hardware is the same as it ever was. I'm running out of ideas.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Corsair Employees RAM GUY Posted November 22, 2006 Corsair Employees Share Posted November 22, 2006 That would suggest a driver issue for both issues if the memory will run and pass http://www.memtest.org and the fact that the driver is not working properly. I would talk to ASUS about a newer drive for your Video card! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kingv Posted November 23, 2006 Author Share Posted November 23, 2006 Thanks for your reply Ram Guy. I wish it was that simple. The issue with the newer video drivers is only observed in the problem tower. These drivers functioned as expected in my old slot Athlon tower which I set up when I RMA'd the motherboard back to ASUS for testing. The newer drivers worked just fine in the problem tower at one time, before it became a problem tower. The event viewer situation I described in my last post was listing the cdrom as the source. However, this error was only logged one day last week. Almost forgot....Happy Thanksgiving Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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