Help! its all gone horribly wrong

[Phasics]

Ok mabe I exagerate some

Ok justa breif intro. last night I stuck a new NV silencer on my 6800 Ultra and a Zalman northbride cooler (the blocko meal no fan kind ) . before I did this everything was running fine had XP full installed on my WD Raptor 74GB no problem, only sligh glitch wasevry so often BIOS wouldnt detect it but it usually picked it up after a reset.

Anyway bascilly my system was running fine, previously had some memory instability which was cleared up with some extra 0.1v on the memory.

Now I put my card back in and loadup

Now I'm greeted by BIOS checksum error , default to orginal settings. ok I reset andthe prob goes away and I setup BIOS again

Now my 74GB is only detected every 3rd-4th time I boot up in a really hit and miss afair.

when itis detected and start to load windows it freezes. if it dosent freeze after bios it will freeze half way into loadup or just beforewindows should come up and gives me a range of error (non repeting) rangin from read write erros to dll files in BSOD.

Ok so I loadup safe mode. I manage to get into safe mode windows and ackup all myfiles onanother drive (thank crap for that) then reset

Now I cant even loadup safe mode anymore it freezes loading up the basic windows files.



Now before I go Nuke my C drive I was wanting your advice on possible things that could be wrong.

a few in my mind include corrupt windows mabe caused by mechanincal (aka me in the case hit somthn) or perhaps during one of the resets.

I've some how screwed up my board by shorting knocking or otherwise damgaing it so that its struggling wih my SATA drive

The HDD Raptor is on the fritz
(oh almost forgot I rana chkdsk under WInXP CD repair and it says its an unrecoginsiable partition !)

I'd ate to waste time trying to reinstall if its the drive thats bad

Orhave I possibl sorted out something on my board mabe I bent a SATA connector on the board (it isjust above the VGA card slot)

Anyway here's my system
Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939
AMD3000
1024GB COrsair 4000 Pro Twinx
74GB WD Raptor
MAxtor 80GB

and an Antec 420W power supply cool blue

Any help would be great

 

[Cybercraig]

Re-seat the cards, memory, and cables. I swapped cases with a Neo2 and got a "Corrupted Windows CD" when I tried to format. Huh? How can that be? Turned out that I had bumped the memory around during transfer. I re-seated both sticks and end of problem.

Abit IS7 - 3.0C @ 3.6ghz - Mushkin PC4000 (2 X 512) - Sapphire 9800Pro - TT 420 watt Pure Power
Samsung 120gb ATA-100 - Maxtor 40gb ATA - 100
Sony DRU-510A - Yellowtail Merlot

 

[Phasics]

Mem swaped out and in

all connections pulled out and back in

VGA card taken out put back in

IDE cables pulled out and back in

SATA cable replaced with a spare I had and used different leadto power the Raptor

all other board ocnnections checked and jumpers too

everything seems to be where it should b and as firmly in as it can be



Still have exactly the same problem so its not a loose connection issue

 

[endyen]

Go into bios, and check your voltages. Sounds like your 12v rail is failing.

 

[Codesmith]

Since you mentioned previous memory instability, running memtest 86 for awhile wouldn't be a bad idea just to rule out the possiblity.

Also is it possible you didn't mount the northbridge heatsink correctly (forgot thermal paste, air gap) and its overheating?

See if your problems are specific to the Raptor / SATA controllers.

Boot from a Knopix CD (Linux that runs of a CD) and see if your system is stable.

Use partion magic to create a 10 GB partion at the beginning of your other drive and try installing windows on that just to see if you have any problems.

 

[Phasics]

Your never gonna believe this

Ok so I satrted going through the hardware

tried some old 512MB RAM
tried some old hard drives
played with BIOS
etc
etc
etc

Nothin seemd to work I was getting
c0000221

Hard Error ntdll.dll

c0000021

c000026c

on and off, sometimers resets sometimes BSOD bascially getting no love what so ever. get a few safe boots going start thinking its my RAM but both sticks of Corsair get the error (so I ruled out mem) HDD in diff combos all still gave error but occationaly owrked and let me boot up in safe.

Finally I give up put everything back in that was oringally in leave of the power and go to dinner

come back power cord in boot and it works fine !!!!!

I'm like WTF ?!?!?

I reboot, same error come abck again

I take out power let it sit for 10mins power back in boot up and it works no problem !!!!!!!!!!!!!!


WTF WTF WTF WTF ?!?!?!?!?!


I shut down leave power in go amke coffe come back boot up and its running beutiful , ran 3DMArk05 just for good measure and it hit 5394 marks.


In short reset = death, shutdown break boot up = gold

I dont understand ??????

is it a capacitor discharge issue ? I'm so confused

but hey I can live with 5-10mins between shutdown and boot so its running fine now

thanks for the advice


btw my 12v rail is running 'OK' accoring to the BIOS but who ever trusts the BIOS rail voltage readings
using AIDA32
I get
1.42 vCore
2.59v
3.26v
11.97v

which looks reasonable to me

 

[Phasics]

Full cycle of memtest86 gave 0 errors

funny u should mention the northbridge cooler I acuatlly had to redesgin it with a HAMMER ! to fit it under the 6800 card MWAHAHAH , works quite well acutally becuase I have a sections of the sinks fins rights near the inlet of the NV silencer so it acts as a fan for northbidge

got a case thermometer on the northbridge to be safe and its running at 35 C (AIDA32 says my motherbaord is at 33 C)

Think I might still investigate to see what drivers the SATA controller is using.

Ran a few other benchmarks like sandra to make sure heat is ok and everything seems to be running fine

Thinking about ghosting my C: drive to another drive just in-case this fluke recovery all goes bad again.


I still dont understand how I can have critcal windows file erros and then BOOM it works no problem (the only thing I saw commign is was a registry entry was bad and was succesful replaced by and automated back repair by windows)


Anyone got any thoughts on why it went from GONNA NUKE C to I love my Rig in just one evening ?