Sponteneous Reboots during OS load

[markjen]

I almost had my new A7N8X Dlx system complete when suddenly it starts
sponteneously rebooting during OS loading. It consistently does it about
5-seconds after starting to load Windows. Safe mode doesn't help. I tried
booting off the setup CD, and doing a recovery, but it blue-screens in
NTFS.SYS shortly after it starts looking at the SATA hard disk. It feels
like prehaps I've got some corruption on the hard disk.

The obvious thing is to reload Windows (ugh), but I'm wondering if maybe I
should go ahead and upgrade to the 1007 BIOS. I'm currently running the
1005 that came with the mobo. I know they changed the SATA ROM for 1007 so
perhaps I should get the latest/greatest before I reload.

Any suggestions appreciated.

- Mark

 

[Ed]

I almost had my new A7N8X Dlx system complete when suddenly it starts
sponteneously rebooting during OS loading. It consistently does it about
5-seconds after starting to load Windows. Safe mode doesn't help. I tried
booting off the setup CD, and doing a recovery, but it blue-screens in
NTFS.SYS shortly after it starts looking at the SATA hard disk. It feels
like prehaps I've got some corruption on the hard disk.

The obvious thing is to reload Windows (ugh), but I'm wondering if maybe I
should go ahead and upgrade to the 1007 BIOS. I'm currently running the
1005 that came with the mobo. I know they changed the SATA ROM for 1007 so
perhaps I should get the latest/greatest before I reload.

Any suggestions appreciated.

- Mark

My first guess would be a bad stick of ram. Have you run memtestx86?
Ed

 

[markjen]

My first guess would be a bad stick of ram. Have you run memtestx86?

Hi Ed. Yep, passed with flying colors. I don't think it's memory because
it never seems to make any difference if I use one stick or two, swap them,
or fiddle with the timings (within reason).

I decided to go ahead and reinstall XP on the Seagate SATA drive, using the
SATA drivers that came with the A7N8X-D board. Windows Setup started
blue-screening immediately when it tried to read and write from the drive.
I found an old 5-GB IDE drive lying around and Windows installed perfectly
on it. I think the SATA drive is probably bad (a Seagate Barracude 1200.7
120GB), although I suppose it's possible I've got something really wrong in
the SATA drivers. But I recall a couple weird hangs and slowdowns where
fiddling with the drive seemed to correct it and I even thought I had a bad
SATA cable at one point (I used another).

I'm RMA'ing the hard disk tomorrow. The saga continues.

- Mark