Hi All!
First of all I dont blame anyone from running from this one, wish I could!



I have a really sickening problem. My motherboard recently decided to fry itself and so I bought a new one made by ECS Elite Group, a P4M900T-M2. All the other parts were tested to make sure they were ok, only the motherboard had appeared to have been damaged. Everything fitted together and there were no problems. On startup the PC booted as normal, but as expected, crashed when the windows log on screen appeared.

Now firstly I thought this would be a straight forward repair using my XP Home disk, but no.

All I got was blue screens of death, thinking the different bios of the old MSI motherboard was causing the problem.
Resigning myself, I decided to reformat the boot partition and do a clean install. That should work, but no again! More blue screens of death these ones displaying a cryptic

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

STOP:0x0000000A (0x00000008,0x00000002,0x00000000,0x80821980)

OR

STOP:0x0000007E (0xC0000005,0x8082232B,0xF78EAA80,0xF78EA77C)

OR

STOP: 0x0000000A (0xf12AC0BC,0x00000001,0x00000000,0x808194A2)

Also another Blue Screen

PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

STOP: 0x00000050 (0xE14A3FC8,0x00000001,0xF737EE9D,0x00000002)

Ntfs.sys - Address F737EE9D base at F734C000, DateStamp 41107eea

And another...........

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

STOP: 0x000000D1 (0x00000000,0x00000002,0x00000000,0x00000000)

I have tried countless times to do a fresh install of XP, (I have the full retail version with sp2) delating the partition and formatting as I go. The closest I have got is (after leaving the PC of for a while) a black screen report saying NTLDR is missing. Or I do reach the "Installing Windows" screen only to be stopped by a fatal error, reporting that one of the components that Windows needs could not be installed. The data in invalid. There is also a setup log file displayed, reporting Installation Failed: H\I386\asms, Error Message: Data is invalid

I have the sick PC beside me as I write this and am trying to collect as much info as I can. Stats for it are 2 gigs of DDR2 Ram, 2.8 Ghz dual core, SATA2 Hard drive 250 gigs partitioned into two areas, a medion tv card, a creative sound card and an Nvida FX7300 GS Graphics card.

Thats everything that is happening. I have used the default setting on the motherboard.
If anyone knows what is going on here I would love to hear from you!

Run MemTest

Thanks I will give it a try. A pal of mine suggested that the memory might be faulty, but both the sticks had recently been replaced, but hey, maybe they are faulty. Worth a go anyways, thanks!

Yeah, thats all about RAM... Happend to me once.

I had a similar prob a few years back, although it's looking like memory, just a reassuring check of your HDD ribbons wont go amiss, I discovered when my fault occured that the ribbon to HDD 0 had slightly come away from the pins on the plug on one end, replaced them and prob solved.

Hi All
Well the memory in the Pc checks out, now I've put the hard drives in for testing. In my local PC shop they put a clean hard drive in the PC with a fresh install of XP and it booted fine. Looks like my mother board took out both hard drives! I will never buy an MSI motherboard again! But........ maybe it could be the SATA cables, but both of them? Once the hard drives have been tested, I will get back to you all and tell you what happened. Thanks (so far) the all the great advice. This is simply the best PC advice forum on the web! Even if my PC is still knackered you guys still helped alot. Many thanks.

Gerryh

Thanks for the kind thoughts and words.

Let us know how it goes.

Was the new hard drive a SATA or IDE?

Hi
The drives were SATAs. As it turned out the motherboard that I was supplied with was not compatable with the drives and that was causing the blue screens. I now have an A-Bit board with 4 SATA ports instead of the previous board's 2 and its now finally up and running! What a hassle all that was. Still, at least I learned that MSI boards are rubbish. Thanks again though for all that great advice!

Kind Regars
GerryH

No problem. Glad all is well.

Let us know if we can help further in the future.