Last ditch repair of crashing W2K box...ideas?!?!?!

[intrepid_dw]

All:

I have a home-brew box built about five years ago to run Windows 2000.
It has served primarily as a host for a printer and a development
database, and in that time has run flawlessly...well, until the last
very few months.

During that time, the box started - perhaps once every two weeks -
crashing. It would always immediately reboot normally. Unfortunately, I
never took the time to thoroughly diagnose it.

Over time, the crashes became more frequent, and now the machine will
not start up Windows 2000 entirely. It will get to the W2K startup GUI
screen (with the "Starting Up" progress bar,) but will usually hang or
(sometimes) crash (BSOD) just as it begins to display the startup login
dialog. The crashes have ranged from IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL to
UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP and have occurred in NTOSKRNL.EXE, HAL.DLL,
and ATAPI.SYS (to name just a few).

The machine will not boot into safe mode - hangs at the login dialog or
during the "Windows is starting..." dialog, but then freeze.

I have been able to start the machine from the CD-ROM and the W2K
installation CD into the Recovery Console - which always works (done
several times) - and ran a chkdsk which found no problems. I ran a Fast
Repair which, unfortunately, froze at 6 seconds before reboot. Upon
rebooting, W2K still froze as it had been.

Hardware: This is a VA-503A motherboard with an AMD k6-2 CPU @ 500Mhz
with (originally) 128MB of PC100 SDRAM, a generic soundcard, and a
generic 10/100 NIC, a Stealth 540 AGP video card (32MB), and a 13GB
Quantum Bigfoot hard drive.

The hardware steps I've taken so far include the following:
* Removal of NIC
* Removal of sound card
* Removal/swap of memory with known good memory
* Change of video card
* Replacement of power supply
* Reset of BIOS to defaults
* Move of boot drive to different cable
* Move of boot drive to different IDE interface
* Elimination of all hardware but hard drive and CD-ROM drive

System BIOS indicates the CPU temp is normal, and aside from the one
freeze in character mode during the emergency repair, all
character-mode operations have worked normally. ONly the transition
from "Starting Up" to "show the logon dialog" does the system
crash/hang hard.

I'm *this* close to a fresh format and restart install, but part of me
is concerned that the motherboard may, in fact, be failing, as I
suspect the crash is happening when the OS is trying to allocate
resources from the system, but the system is balking. If that's the
case, obviously a system rebuild won't do any good. For now, I'm going
to give a parallel installation of W2K a try and see what happens.

I've run out of ideas to try on this problem, and I'd greatly
appreciate any ideas that I may have overlooked or not considered
properly. I realize this is an older box, and I'll readily acknowledge
that it isn't the most critical in the world, but there is some
information on it I'd like to recover if possible (but its not the end
of the world if I don't).

Thanks in advance for your kind suggestions and assistance.

-David

p.s. Please reply to this group; email listed in this message is no
longer active.

 

[Steve Duff [MVP]]

If you're sure it isn't a thermal or power supply issue I'm afraid your
motherboard's power regulation is likely the problem. This is common
as boards age, especially the early Athlon boards which had some
really (for that time) astonishing power requirements. The symptoms you
describe match up with what we typically see for this.

Replacing or repairing a board of this vintage isn't usually
worth the trouble, though it can be done.

Assuming this is an IDE-based machine, I'd change the drivers
to "Standard dual IDE/ATAPI" and just change out the board,
CPU and memory and call it an "upgrade"

Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
Ergodic Systems, Inc.

 

[intrepid_dw]

Steve:

Thanks so much for your reply. I guess I'm confident to the extent
possible that we don't have a power supply issue (replaced with
brand-new unit), and the temp monitors from the BIOS indicate proper
CPU temps.

FWIW, I did attempt the parallel install of W2K, and while the CD-based
portion of the install itself was successful, the machine still hung in
precisely the same manner when attempting to boot into that new
installation. It surely sounds like your answer is as reasonable as any
other.

Although I really don't believe it will help, I'm going to re-flash the
BIOS and see if that makes any difference, and then - last gasp - try
an actual reformat/reinstall. I hold out virtually no hope that either
solution will prevail (agree that I have MB issues), but I guess I'm
just being stubborn...

-David