Hi All,
I've got this little problem that's driving me up the wall

I build my brother-in-law to be a PC for Christmas. I got all the bits from a local computer fair, making sure all the bits fitted each other and were compliant with everything else.

I orginally bought

Motherboard - Asrock K7VT4A+
CPU - AMD Athlon 2.8+ghz (clocked at 2ghz) 333FSB
RAM - 512mb of DDR400
Graphics - cheapo HIS card with 64mb DDR
Hard Drive - 80gb Maxator Diamond 9
CD / DVD-ROM - LD DVD-reader
PSU - 350watt

This all went togther nicely, and I added a CD-RW which I robbed from his old machine and his Creative Labs Audigy Platinum (internal).

Everything was working great, until I came to install windows and the hard drive couldn't be verified after XP had formatted it. I tried partioning it up and usuing the whole drive on its own, but XP didn't like it at all.

I took the hard drive back to the guys at the fair and they exchanged me for an exact new one. Once home it all got set up again and I tried to install XP, but the same problems occured. So I left it over night and tried again, low and behold it worked and everything installed fine

It was working great, Christmas came, and Christmas got very messy as the computer started randomly switching off and / or freezing when the PC was put under high stress situations (i.e. gmaes like Max Payne, Spliter Cell ... etc), but was fine when doing word processing.

After watching the PC for a few hours, reading the error logs and watching the different senarios I thought a change of graphics card and getting a better brand of RAM might be a good idea. So I traded his RAM for mine (mine been exactly the same, except made it was made by Curcial and has heat sink side pannels and when his orginal RAM was put in my machine it ran fine without any problems), and the graphics for an old ATI Radeon 7000 32mb DDR (which I'd used in my 1st ever home built PC that ran games like Max Payne, Half Life ... etc).

This seemed to cure the problem for all of 10 minutes. No sooner had I thought the problems had gone, they were back again, but now the little blighter had turned the auto reboot off when windows gets an error, so he got him slef even more confused

The final straw cam the other month when I changed out the PSU for a 600watt one, and installed a 40gb hard drive as the master and would introduce the 80gb as a slave later (depending on the out come). Once again it was stable for all of two mintues

So the system stands like -

Motherboard - Asrock K7VT4A+
CPU - AMD Athlon 2.8+ghz (clocked at 2ghz) 333FSB
RAM - 512mb of DDR400 Curcial memory with heat sink
Graphics - ATI Radeon 7000 32mb DDR
Hard Drive - 40gb Western Digital master & 80gb Maxator Diamond 9 slave
CD / DVD-ROM - LD DVD-reader & CD-RW
PSU - 600watt
Extra's - Creative Labs Audigy Platinum (internal)


I'm completely lost as to what the problem is, as I've changed everything out apart from the motherboard and CPU.

Thanks for reading this mini essay.



Regards
_____
Meck

This may be time consuming, but have you tried pulling the Audigy Platnum and running without sound for a bit? Then the CDrom/CDRw and DVD Drives...Removing each component until the instablility goes away?

Yeah, I tried running and installing with various combinations. I've got a slight inkling that it might be the IDE bus controller on the motherboard, as I really don't trust Asrock.


Regards
_____
Meck

Next question would have been eliminate the Primary controller by puting the HDD on the secondary.

You wouldnt have an aux controller?

I've tried running the master drive on the secondary channels and I set the BIOS to use the appropreate drives accordingly.

To be honest I'm not sure if there is an aux controller.

Many thanks for your thoughts.


Regards
_____
Meck

A spare or Auxillary HDD controller was what I was refuring to. One you can put into a PCI slot and turn off the onboard. I have looked through everything I have on onboard controllers and they are questionable at best as to the problem. The only other possibility to isolate the problem would be to turn of DMA writes on the HDDs and see if its the DMA controller in the SuperIO.

Ah, no I definately don't have one of those.

I could have a go at the DMA controllers, but I'm worried that the little bugger in all his 'wisdom' might change tham back


Regards
_____
Meck