no p.o.s.t. + bsods = arghh!

Grease Monk

Grease Monk

Intertoob Ninja & Hamster Hunter Extraordinaire
Adept
I've not been using my main comp for the past 1.5 months now. It all started with occasional boot-up problems where it refused to post or activate the display. Later this started becoming more chronic and i would have to keep the comp off for and entire day before it would boot. then one day it just decided not to at all. all the fans would be spinning, but no post.

thought it was a mobo problem. gave just the mobo and proccy to some guy who did something to it and got it working (apparently). but when he screwed it in to my cabinet and hooked it up with my smps the problem arose again. so he took the smps, medled with it for a day and hooked it up and it seemed to be working fine. when i took it home, i had the same problem again. I tried one of my older (lower wattage) smps. same prob or it would post and start to load windows and then i'd get a bsod saying 'paging error in non paged area' most of the time, and some random bsod sceen the other times.

took it over to my friends place and tried his zebronics 400w smps and it worked everynow and then once we fiddled with the ram modules (might have been loose). tried with his ram, same problems. exchanging my ti 4200 for the onboard graphics didnt help. at one point of time, with only his smps connected to my comp (ie all the other componets were my default setup) i was getting stable bootups. SO i figured i needed a new smps, and ordered a powersafe 400w from bangalore. got here today and hooked it up and im getting the same problems. Ive tried safemode; it gets to my desktop, but bsods after a couple of minutes. normal boot wont even let me log in without bsoding. tried running a repair through the win xp cd, but bsods while it copies the files from the cd. my hard disk is fine as ive booted from it on my friend's comp. my temps and voltages are within the conditions i was working with before this nighmare began.

Any ideas on what the problem could be? I've been seriously thinking its something to do with the mobo, but wanted to check out all the other possibilities as dealing with a mobo might require an upgrade of that and the proccy. not bad from MY pov...but my dad on the other hand :hap5:

Here's my config
athlon xp 2000 (palomino) with a vantec aeroflow hsf
asus a7n 266 - vm (onboard is a gf2 mx)
powersafe 400w
msi gf4 ti4200
120 gb seagate (pata)
writer, floppy, ethernet card...
 
were you getting beeps while booting???

my sis has the same board....just beeps when booted.....found out some RAM controller on the board had fried....got it repleaced (under warranty)
 
when it wasnt posting, no beeps...not even if there was no ram or anything. Now it posts fine...but bsods like stated in the original post
 
try running the rig with minimal components.. single stick of ram , no modem, soundcard , etc and give it a shot.. sometimes the cpu heatsink being scewed on too tight gives this problems but yours is a clip on type right ?
 
Hey,
Your problem could be due to your RAM. It seems to be one viable explanation for why it works sometimes, and doesnt at other times. Try another stick of RAM, if available

Regards
Inzider
 
thanks for the feedback guys.
however, i have already tried both of your reccomendations, neither seemed to solve the problem permanently.

@bottle : yes the aeroflow is a clip type.

@inzider : will give the ram thing another go now that i got a new smps.
 
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I'm baffled. I used to get the same BSOD when i used to dload torrents on my old rig. Used to happen since the disk was badly fragmented for one thing. How much ram do you have ?
 
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