I've had this gaming machine for over a year and it has been rock solid. Until about a week ago, it had never crashed. I have an EVGA 7800GT with the "free" EVGA motherboard (nForce 4 chipset), AMD Opteron 144, Seasonic power supply, X-Fi sound card, 2 gigs of patriot (I think) memory, and a couple PATA Seagate hard drives.
A week or two ago, I was searching for a file or something, switched over on my KVM, and when I switched back, it was sitting at the BIOS screen saying something along the lines of "INVALID SYSTEM DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER." That freaked me out, but it just ended up being the boot order in the bios getting switched around. I have no idea how. I switched it back, and everything worked fine...
Until the next day, when I got a nice BSOD when I was running a backup of my data:
MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION
0x0000009C (0x00000004,0x80545FF0,0xB2000000,0x00070F0F)
Googling around, it seemed it had something to do with the hard drive controller, or nvidia's drivers for it. I had never installed those drivers, and never had a problem before, but it made sense as the crashes seemed to be related to heavy hard drive activity. After another crash or two, I ran memtest86 and prime95 for about 24 hours each. Neither had any problems. After that, everything worked fine for about a week. Until now. I exited BF2 and my computer spontaneously rebooted (no BSOD, just a reboot), and windows just reboots right after it gets past that little progress bar every time. It doesn't matter if I try to boot in safe mode or what. It simply reboots every time I try to load windows. I tried a knoppix boot cd, and that worked. I'm not sure if it's a problem with windows, a hardware issue, or what. I'm considering getting a PCI IDE controller just to see if I can boot off of that (can you boot from those?).
A week or two ago, I was searching for a file or something, switched over on my KVM, and when I switched back, it was sitting at the BIOS screen saying something along the lines of "INVALID SYSTEM DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER." That freaked me out, but it just ended up being the boot order in the bios getting switched around. I have no idea how. I switched it back, and everything worked fine...
Until the next day, when I got a nice BSOD when I was running a backup of my data:
MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION
0x0000009C (0x00000004,0x80545FF0,0xB2000000,0x00070F0F)
Googling around, it seemed it had something to do with the hard drive controller, or nvidia's drivers for it. I had never installed those drivers, and never had a problem before, but it made sense as the crashes seemed to be related to heavy hard drive activity. After another crash or two, I ran memtest86 and prime95 for about 24 hours each. Neither had any problems. After that, everything worked fine for about a week. Until now. I exited BF2 and my computer spontaneously rebooted (no BSOD, just a reboot), and windows just reboots right after it gets past that little progress bar every time. It doesn't matter if I try to boot in safe mode or what. It simply reboots every time I try to load windows. I tried a knoppix boot cd, and that worked. I'm not sure if it's a problem with windows, a hardware issue, or what. I'm considering getting a PCI IDE controller just to see if I can boot off of that (can you boot from those?).