What the....

Agent Arek

Hey all me again posting another mechanical mystery

I have an old Dell Dimension 9200 or something like that, recently got a brand new hard drive and installed windows on it because the old one was crappy and bugged to hell, installed Windows XP on it

Few days later got random restarts and BIOS crashes, then when it did boot into windows got the BSOD
Ran recovery console etc then started getting NOPAGE errors and ntrloader errors of all kinds, then it seemed the very hard drive itself didnt want to load, even got BSODs while formatting it while reinstalling windows!!

So got another hard drive today, installed Windows 7 on it, downloaded AVG and Zonealarm, set everything up, starting importing backed up files which were mp3s and picture folders and the same thing happened again, got a msg saying the desktop manager crashed and then restarted the whole pc, BSOD errors tellig me it shut down to save itself etc

Ive tried repairing but i cant even get to the disc sometimes because of all the errors it flashes at me.
Whats even worse is sometimes it loads windows then 5 mins later random restart

Im good with computers but this just boggles my mind, will try and get the dump file online if required

Thanks for listening

Arek

Agent Arek

Just got an IRQL ERROR NOT EQUAL while trying to re install windows 7, for the same error when trying to re install XP on the other hard drive
Common problem anyone can see?
Both hard drives are new, havent tried the old one, do they spin too fast?
Are computers 4 years old unable to cope with 7200rpm hard drives?

Spear

Agent Arek wrote: »

Just got an IRQL ERROR NOT EQUAL while trying to re install windows 7, for the same error when trying to re install XP on the other hard drive
Common problem anyone can see?
Both hard drives are new, havent tried the old one, do they spin too fast?
Are computers 4 years old unable to cope with 7200rpm hard drives?

Run Memtest86+ and check the CPU fan is running properly.

Agent Arek

You think its an overheating problem?

Occam

Agent Arek wrote: »

You think its an overheating problem?

My guess would be that you disturbed the ram(memory) while fittng the hard drive.

Try reseating it then running memtest as suggested by the poster above

Agent Arek

The ram modules are nowhere near the hard drive, the two HD slots are tucked away in the corner

ricman

Try booting, up ,holdown f8, safe mode menu appears, press safe mode with networking,the drive is not too fast.
MAKE sure the fan on the cpu is on.you may have unplugged the power 2 pin cable to the cpu fan.
Google windows xp safe mode.

Theta

Sounds like your ram is not looking healthy. Run memtest like another poster said for a few hours and see what happens.

Yip, check cpu idle temps with coretemp, then run prime 95 for 3 minutes and check max temp value, if within cpu spec then run memtest for 2 passes, if clear run prime 95 small fft's for 12 hours, if clear then you have at least figured out your ram, cpu, are not at fault.

Agent Arek

ok problem now is i cant get into anything because used the windows 7 disc to run repair wizard to replace the boot loaders which were failing, this destroyed windows, tried to re install and now its giving me errors saying to make sure the media(tink thats what it said) is available even tho the disc is obv there and the hard drive specs are on screen

Also when trying to boot from the cd is keeps giving me errors saying windows cant load, needing a few passes through text screens to get to the installer

Ran a memory test with the 7 cd and it crashed after a number of passes

Its throwing system32 errors, ntfs.sys errors, kernel errors, ntloader errors, IRQL errors, files not matching, files corrupt, not there and sometimes when it does load windows it'll give a blue screen and restart, sometimes crashed on the POST
Ive never seen the like and this has happened on two brand new hard drives with two different versions of windows.

Only things i can think of is this:

The power isnt sufficient and something went bang (the new hds are 7200 RPMS whereas the first one i think was 5k) and a GTX card i installed a while back has pushed the power up too high
A driver i installed come to stay, its a Dell 9150 yet the bios says DXP051 for some reason and i cant flush them. Maybe reset the CMOS and hope it resets the bios to basic?
Put back in the old original hard drive and see if anything happens with that

Cant even get into windows to run the memtests or cpu clock temps

*cry*

BrokenArrows

sounds like your ****ed.

if you have some spare memory switch it out.

If not then if you have a spare HD then try and get windows installed on that and see if it boots.

Agent Arek

ah yeah I can afford to switch the computer no problem, its not used for more than web surfing and printing so thats not a problem

Problem is i dont like being beaten by a computer

The errors are just so damn varied I cant pin it down

When the hard drives own firmware started giving errors i replaced it, then ntfs.sys errors with the new one and after that it all went very very wrong

Agent Arek

Hats off to the person who said test the memory, used the Linux memory tester and found maybe 100,000 memory errors ranging from 0-2048, the exact amount of ram
Removed on of the 1gb sticks and hey presto it works and it explains the many many random issues

Thanks again guys