System freezes and HDD LED indicates constant spin

[Guest]

OK here is my setup:

I have an athlon XP 2800+ running on my ASUS A7N8X Deluxe. I have 768MB DDR400 Kingston HyperX RAM. My operating systems are set up to run through GRUB2 dually booting WinXP PRO (my favorite OS) and Red Hat 9 (for college learning purposes). I have connected two 200GB WD HDDs. A DVD-RW and CD-RW and ATAPI ZIP 750 and a floppy.

Here is my situation:

I can boot into RH9 just fine, in fact that is where I am typing this info from. When I boot into windows XP PRO I sometimes have my system hang. Other times I can boot into windows passed the welcome screen and almost start an application. Yet other times I can get it to boot all the way through the first program load and even start to put a decent media load onto it before my screen is frozen. I am thinking it has something to do with the Nvidia chipset drivers that included an EIDE driver, but I had this working before. I am really lost here.

Here are my methods of testing component by component:

I tested the HDDs with the WD utilities.
I rewrote zeros to the drives (took like 2 days to do)
Performed 2 Win XP Pro installs (one with Grub and one with just win xp)
I tested the RAM with memtest for 48 hours
I replaced the chip with a known to be good Athlon XP 2000
I checked windows updates, defragged and ran the system clean utility
I ran the system in safe mode with networking and it seemed to work ok for an hour or two.
I disabled all visual affects and set the processor scheduling to run background services.
Running linux right now, I can do it indefinitely. Windows wont.


Any plausible intelligent suggestions on things I could do or test or any ideas at all what my problems could be?

PS I noticed some of these symptoms when I had win xp service pack 2 installed along with the new express visual studio beta. Also the HDD LED seems to indicate heavy activitiy almost constantly while I run winxp and not while in linux.

 

[Jim]

-----Original Message-----
OK here is my setup:

I have an athlon XP 2800+ running on my ASUS A7N8X

Deluxe. I have 768MB DDR400 Kingston HyperX RAM. My
operating systems are set up to run through GRUB2 dually
booting WinXP PRO (my favorite OS) and Red Hat 9 (for
college learning purposes). I have connected two 200GB
WD HDDs. A DVD-RW and CD-RW and ATAPI ZIP 750 and a
floppy.

Here is my situation:

I can boot into RH9 just fine, in fact that is where I

am typing this info from. When I boot into windows XP
PRO I sometimes have my system hang. Other times I can
boot into windows passed the welcome screen and almost
start an application. Yet other times I can get it to
boot all the way through the first program load and even
start to put a decent media load onto it before my screen
is frozen. I am thinking it has something to do with the
Nvidia chipset drivers that included an EIDE driver, but
I had this working before. I am really lost here.

Here are my methods of testing component by component:

I tested the HDDs with the WD utilities.
I rewrote zeros to the drives (took like 2 days to do)
Performed 2 Win XP Pro installs (one with Grub and one with just win xp)
I tested the RAM with memtest for 48 hours
I replaced the chip with a known to be good Athlon XP 2000
I checked windows updates, defragged and ran the system clean utility
I ran the system in safe mode with networking and it

seemed to work ok for an hour or two.

I disabled all visual affects and set the processor

scheduling to run background services.

Running linux right now, I can do it indefinitely. Windows wont.


Any plausible intelligent suggestions on things I could

do or test or any ideas at all what my problems could be?

PS I noticed some of these symptoms when I had win xp

service pack 2 installed along with the new express
visual studio beta. Also the HDD LED seems to indicate
heavy activitiy almost constantly while I run winxp and
not while in linux.

.
Take a look in your device manager for problems, while

booted into the safe mode. Update any drivers as needed.
And check for error and warning messages in the Event
Viewer in Administrative tools in the control panel. You
also must scan for any viruses, worms, trojans, spyware,
and adware using updated programs which you can do while
in safe mode. Look in the Task Manager for which apps may
be unfamiliar and using too much memory. Also use the
system config utility, (msconfig.exe) on the startup tab
to control what programs are starting.

 

[Guest]

I was thinking it might be the nvidia nforce drivers. I am installing the drivers from the ASUS site now that it is back up and I will post what I find. In MSCONFIG (which I failed to mention earlier) I disabled any utilties that were not essential to proper start up (i.e.: MS Office XP, asus probe, etc.) When in safe mode I notice that the system runs seemslessly flawless. I also not that when I run the driver compatibility wizard I see about 8 drivers that are loaded that I dont recognize. I also note a wowexec in the task manager that is not aligned right and has no user name to execute. I will scan my system at Syamntec (if it is stable enough to do so) and then install Norton 2004 AV and PF. I will post back if this fixes t he problem.