BSOD known cause, what solution?

[1031982]

Ya, I know what's causing the BSOD's, but it's REAL annoying. It's my SATA controller or driver. It likes to conflict with my sound card . There has been no updates on either driver. My sound card can be in one of 2 spots physically, and it's been moved. I can have BSOD or no sound. Catch is, my Raptor is on that controller, and nothing else. I really don't want to disable it as the speed, well, anyone who has used one knows the speed these things offer. I use the optical input and digital sound decoding of the Sound Blaster.
If I have to get a new SATA controller card as add-on in PCI, that's fine. But I am not sure what I could get that's cheep (I am poor) and is GOOD.

I can delay BSOD's by marking the first IRQ as reserved in my BIOS, but I need to re-boot every 2 days other wise BOOM. It doesnt matter how much, or little I do. I have checked RAM and CPU already, so that eliminated those. The PSU I have is fine, if I disconnect my optical drives I get the same crash.

[figueroa]

wow, haven't thought about IRQ conflicts in long, long time. assuming ur talking about the a7n8x that u have listed in ur sig, if i remember correctly, the agp slot and pci slot 1 share the same irq. pci slots 2 and 3 use separate irq's with pci slots 4, 5 and the usb controller sharing an irq.

so for irq finicky pci cards you'd want to install those in pci slots 2 or 3. also, for WinXp during install i would turn off the acpi support. if it's on WinXp would manage the irq's and at times with certain cards wouldn't do a very good job. to do this, during install when the WinXp installer is prompting you to hit F6 for an additional driver disk to be read, like a sata or scsi, hit either F5 or F8 ( i can never remember which one so i usually hit both) which will bring up a menu listing different PC configs that WinXp will install to. if i recall you then want to pick standard pc (not the one listing acpi support). i don't recall if the a7n8x allows acpi to be turned off in the BIOS. there were some mobo's that would let you do that.

anywho, there might be easier fixes out there but this is what i recall from the olden days. hope it helps.

[1031982]

Thank you for the info, but I forced the IRQ assigning to reserved for so things could get there own IRQ's, and it worked out great until now. Video card has it's own, and my sound card has it's own. Weird thing is that the SATA controller is seen as getting it's own as well. USB is shared with something, I can't remember what. And both IDE is good. Funny thing, I was looking in my settings again, and my CPU was being volted at 1.775, and I don't remember setting it that high. Sure enough, I drop the voltage and fre3quency and things seem to be fine now. I will update when I know more, but it seems the voltage damaged the CPU, so I need to get a new one. I couldn't even get the XP setup to load without a BSOD on USB interfaces, with them disabled! So, I am going to have to do some real searching for a socket A CPU, I can't afford a new PC and I would rather just use stock speeds as I don't do a lot of hardware stressful things anymore. Most extreme thing I do is video encoding, and I let my system do that over night anyway.

Note : I first checked BIOS settings when I did a CPU stress test, and I got the lovely BSOD again. When getting back in Windows, I stressed it again to verify and it went out the same way, only quicker.

[Trinity]

Get new cpu here.

http://computers.search.ebay.com/AMD...MDQ 202400Q2b

[1031982]

Very true, but I have no money. I can't even afford to ship a DVD-ROM through RMA. Plus, I would rather go through a retail box now as processing is done from my sound card and video card more then anything now. I all my intense gaming on my XBox 360 now.

[1031982]

Ok, about how long do I have? I realise it's an estimate, and that it's basically unknown, but if I can use the CPU for a long time, I will. I have it clocked at 1600MHz and the voltage is at 1.5

[The_YongGrand]

I'm not sure, but overclocked hardware can cause flakyness in some of these controllers. Have you bounced back the settings to the default ones?

[1031982]

I tried, but I got this CPU under the impression it could run with 1.5V (My boards lowest selection), where it's default is 1.35V. Now, if I go and put in the correct values it gives me a random BSOD, usually involving the USB controller for some reason. So, I have it running at a speed I know it can run safely, with 1.5V slowing killing it begging family to barrow money for a new CPU.

The CPU is a Athlon XP Mobil, but NewEgg (When it was there) said the voltage setting was for 1.5V. So, I slowly went up to get a nice stable 2.2GHz overclock making it comparable to the Intel 3.2GHz. But, for a little over 2 years of running without a problem, I guess I am lucky for that. Just, after I got my 360 I never really needed that power anymore for games.
On a side note, I did find it weird that it was my SATA controller causing problems with the Sound Blaster because Creative Labs HIGHLY recommends placing it in the bottom/last PCI slot, and when I did that I had no problems. Guess this explains it! I am going to try running without the SATA chip later on, to see if that is the culprit, just to make sure.

[1031982]

Ok, I can honestly say I NEVER want to do that again. I loaded back up with the old partition, and BOOM! Same thing. Dropped the settings back, and everything was fine. So i load Partition Magic back up, and re-enable my SATA controller, and somehow the boot information is gone! Literally, I ran Bootcfg from recovery mode, and nothing was there. Stupid Windows doesnt like my SATA when there is an IDE HDD there, and I forgot that so it tried loading from the IDE, and it removed the boot script. I did a repair install, and am back up, but man, XP was not nice at all, it took FOREVER! More time repairing then a clean install.

[1031982]

Update!
Talk about irony! I was able to barrow some money for a new CPU, I just got a 2700+ Retail kit. No overclocking as I don't need the speed. But the irony is the now my mobo beeps at me! It's a warning of a overheating or slow running CPU.