System Error ?

[jt3]

A new (relatively) machine and installation. Been debugging everything,
but it's been slow, so still haven't tried SP2, since still having problems
with a relatively barebones system. BIOS update (on a new machine!) took
care of the apparent overheating.
System randomly either locks up or reboots. Not often, perhaps on the
average, once in 4-5 hours. The system event log gives category (102) event
1003 called from System Error, details are error code 1000008e, param1
c0000005, params 2-3 vary, param4 00000000. Googling brings up very little
except some forum talk about 102-1003 being associated with hardware or
driver failures. From where they get this info, I couldn't say. The other
thing that looks closest is associated with KB310740, and the system *does*
have an Audigy2ZS sound card, but the card is not that old, the system is
relatively new (July) and I updated the drivers when I installed the OS.
Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? The only thing that occurs to me
is to do the whole mess again, but, in my experience, that usually produces
the same problem--usually best to get some idea of where the problem is
first?

Thanks,
Joe

 

[Malke]

A new (relatively) machine and installation. Been debugging
everything,
but it's been slow, so still haven't tried SP2, since still having
problems
with a relatively barebones system. BIOS update (on a new machine!)
took care of the apparent overheating.
System randomly either locks up or reboots. Not often, perhaps on
the
average, once in 4-5 hours. The system event log gives category (102)
event 1003 called from System Error, details are error code 1000008e,
param1
c0000005, params 2-3 vary, param4 00000000. Googling brings up very
little except some forum talk about 102-1003 being associated with
hardware or
driver failures. From where they get this info, I couldn't say. The
other thing that looks closest is associated with KB310740, and the
system *does* have an Audigy2ZS sound card, but the card is not that
old, the system is relatively new (July) and I updated the drivers
when I installed the OS.
Anyone have any ideas or suggestions? The only thing that occurs
to me
is to do the whole mess again, but, in my experience, that usually
produces the same problem--usually best to get some idea of where the
problem is first?

It sounds to me like you have some hardware component that is failing.
This can happen on a new system as normally if hardware is going to
fail, it does so within the first few months. After that, it will wait
until the day after your warranty expires or go for years.

Here are some hardware troubleshooting steps:
1) Open the computer and run it open, cleaning out all dust bunnies and
observing all fans (overheating will cause system freezing);
2) test the RAM - I like Memtest86 from www.memtest86.com - let the test
run for an extended (like overnight) period of time - unless errors are
seen immediately;
3) test the hard drive with a diagnostic utility from the mftr.;
4) the power supply may be going bad or be inadequate for the devices
you have in the system;
5) test the motherboard with something like TuffTest from
www.tufftest.com. Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out
suspected parts with known-good parts. If you can't do the testing
yourself and/or are uncomfortable opening your computer, take the
machine to a good local computer repair shop (not a CompUSA or Best Buy
type of store).

Malke

 

[jt3]

It sounds to me like you have some hardware component that is failing.
This can happen on a new system as normally if hardware is going to
fail, it does so within the first few months. After that, it will wait
until the day after your warranty expires or go for years.

Here are some hardware troubleshooting steps:
1) Open the computer and run it open, cleaning out all dust bunnies and
observing all fans (overheating will cause system freezing);
2) test the RAM - I like Memtest86 from www.memtest86.com - let the test
run for an extended (like overnight) period of time - unless errors are
seen immediately;
3) test the hard drive with a diagnostic utility from the mftr.;
4) the power supply may be going bad or be inadequate for the devices
you have in the system;
5) test the motherboard with something like TuffTest from
www.tufftest.com. Testing hardware failures often involves swapping out
suspected parts with known-good parts. If you can't do the testing
yourself and/or are uncomfortable opening your computer, take the
machine to a good local computer repair shop (not a CompUSA or Best Buy
type of store).

Malke
--
MS MVP - Windows Shell/User
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"

No, I put it together myself, it's clean, has an Antec 350 w PS in a Sonata
case with extra fans (pointed the proper directions), and Zalman CPU cooler.
Got somewhat elaborate, using a thermistor bridge to check operating temps,
as I thought I was fighting heat until I updated the BIOS.

I probably do need to check the memory as you say. But I have had a *lot*
of software problems: drivers that needed updating, as well as the BIOS, all
of which wouldn't be surprizing if I were using SP2, but it's XPSP1 out of
the box with hotfixes up till SP2. It's miles better than at first, but not
right. Mostly, I've had enough driver problems to make me think I might
still have something there somewhere.

Some things obviously my fault, like leaving the XP firewall enabled when I
installed the EZ Armor package, but it all makes it a long haul. I'm still
not comfortable with the result of that, since I found out that you can't
actually remove EZ Armor completely for the reinstall, since the filter
drivers it installs to do the boot sector checking on things like floppies
are not removable--MS never provided a mechanism for removing filter drivers
apparently.

Thanks for the suggestions about the hdwe ( I keep trying to ignore the
possibility since they're more expensive to try to troubleshoot) and I will
follow it up, but it takes me a while to get to it.

One thing I'm wondering about--is there any listing of all the system error
categories and event numbers that's accessible to someone without a special
pipeline into MS? All my googling brought up little except for sites which
will do it on a contract or subscription basis, and no indication of what
you'd get for your money.

Thanks,
Joe

 

[Malke]

jt3 wrote:

No, I put it together myself, it's clean, has an Antec 350 w PS in a
Sonata case with extra fans (pointed the proper directions), and
Zalman CPU cooler. Got somewhat elaborate, using a thermistor bridge
to check operating temps, as I thought I was fighting heat until I
updated the BIOS.

Again, it does not matter if the hardware is new. You can still have a
failing component.

I probably do need to check the memory as you say. But I have had a
*lot* of software problems: drivers that needed updating, as well as
the BIOS, all of which wouldn't be surprizing if I were using SP2, but
it's XPSP1 out of
the box with hotfixes up till SP2. It's miles better than at first,
but not
right. Mostly, I've had enough driver problems to make me think I
might still have something there somewhere.

Well, there's no way for me to untangle this in a newsgroup post. You've
got way too many factors going on. You need to strip the machine down
the bare necessities (motherboard and video card) and test. Then add a
hard drive and test, and so on. Then format the drive and reinstall
Windows.

Some things obviously my fault, like leaving the XP firewall enabled
when I
installed the EZ Armor package, but it all makes it a long haul. I'm
still not comfortable with the result of that, since I found out that
you can't actually remove EZ Armor completely for the reinstall, since
the filter drivers it installs to do the boot sector checking on
things like floppies are not removable--MS never provided a mechanism
for removing filter drivers apparently.

??? I have no idea what you mean by this. This makes no sense. In any
case, leaving the XP firewall on when you installed EZ-Armor would not
have a bad effect. Something else is wrong on your system.

One thing I'm wondering about--is there any listing of all the system
error categories and event numbers that's accessible to someone
without a special
pipeline into MS? All my googling brought up little except for sites
which will do it on a contract or subscription basis, and no
indication of what you'd get for your money.

Not just for Exchange:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=BE596899-7BB8-4208-B7FC
-09E02A13696C&displaylang=en

Either put url in your browser's addressbar on one line or just Google
for "err.exe + Microsoft downloads".

Malke

 

[jt3]

Thank you very much. Working on it as I can. More soon, as I have results.

Thanks,
Joe

 

[jt3]

This is just an update to the previous posts. I ran Memtest86 on the
machine for over 9 hours, 9hrs, 6mins, to be precise, and again for 13hrs,
17 min; 0 errors in both cases, but in checking over the System Event logs,
which I hadn't checked very thoroughly before, I found that the application
errors were principally ones which accounted for the times the machine hung,
the CA EZ Armor AV True Vector Service was the culprit--only other app error
was WMP which I think was my daughter's doing when she tried to play her MP3
player through the machine. The system errors varied, predominantly seemed
to occur when the machine was at idle, when it would reboot itself, having
recovered from the error. There were a 3 or 4 8e errors, some 1a errors,
one 7e, a couple of 0a(s), a 20, and a couple of 55(s), identifying NTFS as
the complainant, but running chkdsk found no problems. I believe the 55s
came from when I flashed the BIOS and didn't catch the enabling of the PATA
RAID in the BIOS setup. Anyhow, they haven't repeated. The total time
frame is from the beginning of July to date, running a couple of hours most
days, say 5 out of seven.
This seemed to point (in light of the memtest run) to drivers, so I
tried, very inadvisedly, as it turned out, to use Driver Verifier. The
machine ran, very, very slowly for a while then blue screened with a
DRIVER_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL but when I tried to reboot the machine afterwards,
it ran as if in treacle, more slowly than my old 386SX with 8MB RAM ran Win
95, and this is an Athlon 64 2GHz machine with 1GB of memory. When I tried
to look at the results, Verifier informed me that I should add more physical
memory, since (some kind of) memory usage was at 60%. Worse by far is the
fact that now the machine runs that way all the time in normal mode, except
that it faults or hangs much more often. It runs about five times faster in
safe mode than in normal, in fact.
I haven't been able to see what is going on here; Process Explorer
doesn't show any abnormal (that I can tell) processes running; nothing looks
wrong in Device Manager, and I haven't figured out any other place to look.
I tried to do a System Restore, and it refused to do it for any of the
restore points (all reasonable ones, as far as I could tell) that I tried.
One other very strange occurrence that I'd not ordinarily mention, is
that I tried installing PC Wizard ver. 1.63 (www.cpuid.com) as a system
inventory application (Aida32 gave some inconsistent results) to see how it
would do, a couple of days ago, and it apparently uninstalled the CPU
micocode patch that had come in the F4 BIOS version to fix the CPU
temperature monitor reading problem, and I say it this way, since the
original error was also reported in the BIOS temperature reading as well as
the Gigabyte utility (K8NS Pro mbd), and after the upgrade flash, the BIOS
report was correct as was the utility's. The BIOS has a selectable beep
warning which I keep enabled, and as soon as I used the PC Wizard function
to check on the identity and features of the CPU, it started beeping at
me--I immediately checked the utility, and it was reporting temps of 110 deg
C! The processor heat sink didn't feel hot, and rebooting the machine
returned it to normal when the BIOS reinstalled the patch. It was
repeatable, PC wizard working just fine until checking the CPU. So I can't
say that it didn't do something less obvious that might have led to this,
but it doesn't seem likely.
If I strip things off the computer, all I can strip is the modem and the
sound card. The sound card, Audigy 2ZS, makes some sense, as they can be
troublesome, but there hasn't been any sign of trouble on the installation
phase, as far as it was concerned. All the troubles I had were with the
on-board stuff--SATA, RAID, IEEE 1394, extra IDE ports, AC97 (disabled),
LAN, parallel, serial, USB, but I got around those by installing with
different combinations of disabling in the BIOS until I got one that worked,
then re-enabling them, and letting the drivers install then. That's part of
why I'm not keen on going back to square one. Apparently W XP considers
IEEE 1394 as NICs? And another curious thing: W XP thinks the machine has
WAN capabilities also? This one doesn't according to the mbd manual,
anyway, but I couldn't seem to make Windows give up the idea.

Having nearly shot my bolt on this, the only thing I can think of trying
is to replace the drivers in safe mode, and this is a little uncertain for
me, since DM has always insisted that the nVidia chipset driver is not
installed, even though I had installed it early on, so I'm not sure how I'm
going to achieve that short of an 'install over the top of' type of
approach.

Welcoming any and all suggestions or thoughts, thank you for your time.
Joe

 

[Malke]

This is just an update to the previous posts. I ran Memtest86 on
the

(vast snippage)

As I told you in my last reply, there is no way anyone can untangle what
you've got and what you've done from newsgroups postings. You've got
way too much going on and your troubleshooting is not focused. This is
not something that can be handled off-site. You need to take the
machine to a good local professional and have them vet it for you. I am
not saying this to hurt your feelings, but rather to be practical.

Good luck,

Malke