kawiboy Posted December 6, 2009 Share Posted December 6, 2009 This is my second system which I built a few months ago (around June 09) and unlike the first, this one has always experienced a little instability from the beginning. The specs. are as follows: Corsair VX450W Gigabyte GA31-ES2L Intel E5200 @ 2.5GHz Corsair XMS2 CM2X2048-6400C5 4GB (2x2048MB) 1.8V Ver 1.2 Sapphire ATI 5770 Samsung 1TB HD103UJ Pioneer DVR-216D Sony USB Card Reader Windows XP Pro SP3 What used to be an occasional system crash (perhaps once a week) has increasingly become more frequent (3-4 crashes in a day). The crashes seem to be happening randomly, e.g. browsing, watching a DVD, system boot, application install etc. After doing a fresh OS install twice and installing nothing but bare minimum software and certified drivers I've finally exhausted the possibility of an OS/driver issue and am now looking at all the hardware that could be suspect. I ran memtest86+ last night. In ~10 hours of testing there seems to have been 23 errors (all in Test #7 for some reason.) A few questions: 1. Am I doing the right thing? Do the memory and BIOS settings look alright (bios-1.jpg and bios-2.jpg)? In other words, are these test results valid? 2. If the results are valid, I plan to re-run them on each individual module. 3. What else can I do to further isolate the issue? Thanks in advance! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wired Posted December 6, 2009 Share Posted December 6, 2009 Test ONE stick at a time in the same slot using Memtest86+ v4.00. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kawiboy Posted December 7, 2009 Author Share Posted December 7, 2009 Made a Memtest86+ 4.00 bootable. Here's what I plan to test over the next few days: 1. Stick 1, Slot 0 - 24 hour test, no errors 2. Stick 2, Slot 0 - 24 hour test, no errors 3. Stick 1, Slot 1* - 22 hour test, no errors 4. Stick 2, Slot 1* - 22 hour test, no errors 5. Stick 1, Slot 0 + Stick 2, Slot 1 - 35 hour test, no errors 6. Stick 2, Slot 0 + Stick 1, Slot 1 Will update this post as and when the results roll in. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kawiboy Posted December 12, 2009 Author Share Posted December 12, 2009 Any feedback in light of the above results so far? Was this a memtest 2.11 issue? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kawiboy Posted December 13, 2009 Author Share Posted December 13, 2009 So in light of the previous tests, I went back to the assumption that it might not have been a hardware failure. Did a clean install of Windows XP Pro with SP3 yesterday. Everything seemed fine. System was pretty stable all day yesterday. Started the system up today morning and got a BSOD (STOP code 0x50) within a few minutes! Rebooted, got into Windows and ran chkdsk which reported some file system errors that needed fixing. Scheduled chkdsk to run on the next boot so it could repair the problems. After that I booted with the memtest CD and immediately got a slew of errors. I'm running out of theories over here but this latest episode seems to suggest a hardware issue. Please advise! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kawiboy Posted June 9, 2010 Author Share Posted June 9, 2010 Unfortunately, I have to revive this thread as one of the memory sticks seems to have gone bad for good. Tried to boot the system today and instead got a continuos stream of BIOS beeps. Did a brief lookup on the BIOS codes and the system memory was listed as the prime suspect. I've swapped out the 2x2GB modules and installed them one at a time. In all cases, the system refused to boot up and the BIOS sounded continuous beeps when one of the modules was installed (irrespective of the slot) Now that I've removed the bad module, the system seems to be stable running with the remaining good module. Awaiting feedback from Corsair for next steps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wired Posted June 9, 2010 Share Posted June 9, 2010 RMA Link's on the left. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.