SkiFletch
New member
Since I know many of you are very good with computers, I'd figure it's worth a shot asking here to get another few minds on my problem. Been having a lot of system instability for a while now and I'm hoping you guys can help me shed some light on why.
So, a couple months ago I started having stability problems with my computer. It would BSOD, hard lock, crash programs a lot, and occasionally even restart for no apparent reason. Since it had been a good 2 years since I had installed XP I figured it was time for a format/reinstall. So I backed all my stuff up, and just for good measure ran a surface scan on the two WD 80gig SATA drives in RAID 0 individually. Both checked out fine, so I dismantled the RAID array, wrote zeros to both drives, and did a good old fashioned vaccum/cleaning of the whole computer (to remove dust/etc).
Recreated the RAID 0 array, re-installed Windows (after struggling to find the correct RAID driver), and everything seemed normal for a couple weeks. Then the instability problems began anew, same as before only this time it would sometimes lock up in windows startup (something it did not do before). Running a scandisk would usually turn up filesystem errors which once fixed would return the computer to working order. So clearly, bad data is being written to windows driver files. I suspected a RAM problem so I ran a memtest-86 which turned up no errors. Since then problems have gotten steadily worse and the computer will no longer even go into safe mode. I disabled the RAID array again and surface scanned each drive just to make sure and it too came back with 0 errors.
This leads me to believe that another hardware component is screwing up somewhere causing incomplete or bad data to be written to the hard drive, but I don't know how to isolate which component it may be. The system specs are as follows:
AMD Athlon 64 1800+
DFI Lanparty UT
1gig Muskin DDR400 RAM (2x512)
ATi Radeon X850
2 WD 80gig 7200rpm SATA drives in RAID 0 (onboard controller)
Onboard audio
Onboard LAN
LiteOn DVD burner
Custom watercooling
I built the system about 4 years ago back when I used to have time to play games and I used to OC it, but haven't done that in 2 years. Regardless, the water cooling has kept the system very cool even in the dead of summer. Most temps are usually in the 30s celsius.
Anyways, just curious if you guys have any good ideas about what my problem may or may not be and/or how to test it. Especially if you know any DOS or CD-bootable utilities to test processor and motherboard function. Graspin at straws here to figure out which component is the culprit. Thanks for any help.
So, a couple months ago I started having stability problems with my computer. It would BSOD, hard lock, crash programs a lot, and occasionally even restart for no apparent reason. Since it had been a good 2 years since I had installed XP I figured it was time for a format/reinstall. So I backed all my stuff up, and just for good measure ran a surface scan on the two WD 80gig SATA drives in RAID 0 individually. Both checked out fine, so I dismantled the RAID array, wrote zeros to both drives, and did a good old fashioned vaccum/cleaning of the whole computer (to remove dust/etc).
Recreated the RAID 0 array, re-installed Windows (after struggling to find the correct RAID driver), and everything seemed normal for a couple weeks. Then the instability problems began anew, same as before only this time it would sometimes lock up in windows startup (something it did not do before). Running a scandisk would usually turn up filesystem errors which once fixed would return the computer to working order. So clearly, bad data is being written to windows driver files. I suspected a RAM problem so I ran a memtest-86 which turned up no errors. Since then problems have gotten steadily worse and the computer will no longer even go into safe mode. I disabled the RAID array again and surface scanned each drive just to make sure and it too came back with 0 errors.
This leads me to believe that another hardware component is screwing up somewhere causing incomplete or bad data to be written to the hard drive, but I don't know how to isolate which component it may be. The system specs are as follows:
AMD Athlon 64 1800+
DFI Lanparty UT
1gig Muskin DDR400 RAM (2x512)
ATi Radeon X850
2 WD 80gig 7200rpm SATA drives in RAID 0 (onboard controller)
Onboard audio
Onboard LAN
LiteOn DVD burner
Custom watercooling
I built the system about 4 years ago back when I used to have time to play games and I used to OC it, but haven't done that in 2 years. Regardless, the water cooling has kept the system very cool even in the dead of summer. Most temps are usually in the 30s celsius.
Anyways, just curious if you guys have any good ideas about what my problem may or may not be and/or how to test it. Especially if you know any DOS or CD-bootable utilities to test processor and motherboard function. Graspin at straws here to figure out which component is the culprit. Thanks for any help.
