having trouble with new build

[mentalcrisis00]

Just got the new CPU/Mobo/RAM that is in my sig and I'm having a couple problems. The major one is that since I installed this setup 3 days ago vista has hung up 4 times. It seems to happen when I have mozilla open and everything freezes for 30 seconds and then comes back (sometimes). I just had to do a hard restart and the primary drive where my OS is installed did not show at post and I got a Error Loading OS. Had to turn off completely to get it to show back up.

I did prime95 test for 3 hours yesterday with no errors so I'm inclined to think it's either a board or HDD problem. My Hard drive is probably 3 years old now, it's a WD Cavier 250GB which has had at least a dozen reformats since I got it. I'm also using an older Enermax Noisetaker 485W PSU using 4 to 8pin power adapter. I had it on my old AMD X2 build for 5 years without trouble and was hoping it would be able to power this system. I did however make the mistake of changing the HDD BIOs setting from IDE to AHCI AFTER I installed vista, could this be the source of the problem? Would a reformat or repair be a possible solution? I'm running 2 other drives a 500GB sata and 120GB IDE and Bios has been flashed to new version.

My second problem which is more of an annoyance than anything is that when I select Shut Down in vista it goes threw the shutdown screen and HDD's turn off, however the case and cpu fans keep running and won't shut off until I hold the power button down. I dunno whats happening here, I have the board set to Smart Fan Control - Auto and one of my fans is using a Zalman speed controller. They're all hooked into the board including the VGA Fan. Any thoughts? Vista Power settings are at "High Performance" as suggested by another forum. The temps are within norms cpu 25-50C, chipset 40-45C, HDD 50-56C, GPU 47-60C

Thanks in advance everyone

-Ray

 

[Maverick]

I think your instincts are right on, the power supply and/or Hard drive seem to be the culprits. I'd recommend changing out the PSU for now and seeing if that fixes it.

Also make sure your temps are not going too high, if it's failing after a little while overheating could be a problem.

 

[mentalcrisis00]

Well I have a new HSF coming in because I am running stock now which leaves much to be desired. I did a SMART quick test with western digital diagnostics and it said Pass. I tried using the DOS boot program but it said "cannot boot from DOS click any key to retry", I'm guessing thats cause i'm using vista? Anyhow to me the temps seem ok, those are lower overall than my old X2 system.

 

[techmanc]

A lot of DOS only programs wont run or see NTFS systems.

 

[mentalcrisis00]

i think it may have been a problem with AHCI, I didn't get my settings straight till after I installed vista. I had a strange error in cdburnerxp that said it couldn't find my disc drive, after some searching I saw a reference to reinstalling the Intel Matrix Storage Driver. Didn't think of it before cause I assumed vista had it already installed, perhaps it got corrupted? Anyhow reinstalled that and there hasn't been a lockup for nearly 12 hours. Phew it's time to go to sleep

 

[Davegod]

I hit this thread on the search as I have similar problem. If it adds any more info I note that in event viewer I have multiple errors under ATAPI: "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort2".

Originally posted by: mentalcrisis00
J I did however make the mistake of changing the HDD BIOs setting from IDE to AHCI AFTER I installed vista, could this be the source of the problem?

I'm curious why do you change BIOS setting from IDE to AHCI? Is this something I have just completely failed to know about? In my BIOS [AMI bios on a P35 MSI Neo2-FR] the only relevant option seems to be under "RAID mode" which is set to IDE (other choices RAID & AHCI). I have single drive so skipped right past this entry.

I had a look at the Intel Matrix Storage Driver readme for clues and it mentions looking at what storage mode is in use. My Device Manager just says Microsoft iSCSI controller.

My second problem which is more of an annoyance than anything is that when I select Shut Down in vista it goes threw the shutdown screen and HDD's turn off, however the case and cpu fans keep running and won't shut off until I hold the power button down. I dunno whats happening here, [...]

For some reason MS decided that people would rather this button turn into sleep. You can change the function of the button by going into Control Panel > Power Options and on the left pane there should be "choose what the power button does".

 

[Davegod]

Just to followup:

So it seems the BIOS can make SATA emulate IDE and this was set by default on my MSI Neo2-FR (Intel P35). This basically means windows sees the drive as IDE rather than AHCI (SATA). Perhaps useful if its going into a system running XP and somebody really doesn't want to do the "F6 floppy driver" thing, but IMHO it's bad practice that leaves people like me unaware they're running a workaround.

I'm hoping it's problems with the IDE emulation that was causing my problems as I have now switched to AHCI.

Switching on an existing boot looked troublesome. As it turned out, since I have Vista (SP1, though I dont think that matters) I could simply set the registry to allow loading AHCI driver, restart to enter BIOS and change what it calls "RAID mode" setting from IDE to AHCI. Upon loading windows, it automatically installed the stock windows drivers and made me restart. That seemed fine but I ran Intel Matrix Storage Manager just so that I would have newer versions (all it seems to have updated is "Intel(R) ICH9R/DO/DH SATA AHCI Controller" for which Device Manager shows driver provided by Intel & dated 11 Feb 09, the other stuff is still MS & dated in 2006).

Pondered reinstalling Intel ICH9 driver but decided that's enough fiddling for today.

Fingers crossed that's solved my problem, I'll post again otherwise (though I suppose I might not be posting if somehow the pc gets hosed but anyway...)