Asus/VIA/Gforce/Directx HELP

[subz]

This is the story:
3 days ago I bought this,

1Gh Athlon thunderbird
Asus A7V133 mb
256 mb 133 ram
IBM Deskstar 30gb, 7200rpm ( NEW)
leadtek GTS Pro 64mb

Drivers I use are:
4 in 1 (latest) drivers for VIA chip
bios version 1004 for ASUS board (latest)
10.80 drivers for G-Force card

Prior to this I ran a 500mhz Athlon and MSI 6167 motherboard with Matrox G400 video card.
This system I ran for about a year with no hitches.

O/S is windows 98SE for both, DX8 for both.

The problem is this:
Since installing NEW motherboard/CPU/Video card/ Harddisk, windows has been doing strange things.
Yesterday after putting New stuff into case in a freshly partitioned and formated things went great. Installed all latest drivers and machine was good. THEN CAME DIRECTX 8a, installed it and rebooted.
Upon reboot the machine froze before getting into windows with this message "WINDOWS PROTECTION ERROR","YOU WILL NEED TO RESTART YOU MACHINE"... So I did and went into safe mode to check what was up. Looked at DX8 diag screen to see any errors and there was none, scan disk nothing, so reinstalled DX8 and rebooted....same error message!!!!
Tried everything I know and still no boot other than safe mode.
SO, I formatted again and am now running DX6.1 bloody worried about upgrading DX.
Looked everywhere for a fix but cant find one.

HELP

 

[HellDiver]

1. There's no "general" problem with DX8a, as I have it running quite nicely on P3V4X w/ P3-600EB on ATI card.
2. I'm planning to install 2 rigs this Friday, <b>identical</b> to yours, except for videocard - they got Asus V7700 and V7100. If I'll have any updates on how it went for me, I'll try to let you know. Got an email address?
3. Try using an older Detonator (v5.xx? v6.xx maybe?)
4. What exactly did you mean by "latest" 4-in-1? Different websites have different versions of 4-in-1 for "latest". Try going for 4.25a (for test purposes only), or just replacing with older GART?
5. Try installing Leadtek drivers for the GeForce. (From version number I figure you're using NVIDIA's original Detonator. Correct me if I'm wrong).
6. Ghost. Early and often. Saves you A LOT of time when debugging systems.

Hope this help any, and I'll let you know on the progress with my friends' 2 rigs.

 

[subz]

Gidday and thnz for your reply.
I have the system running sweet now.
The issue was infact to do with IRQ conflicts that weren't showing up as a conflict.
Network cards and soundcards seem to cause alot of issues with the newer M/B's with VIA chipsets.
What I did was to keep the NIC and the sound card very much apart in the PCI slots and make sure that they weren't sharing IRQ's even though the system allows them to.
I'm at work now and not at the said machine. What I will do out of interest for you is post the IRQ seeting that worked, I'll get them through the system report function and paste them here.

Thanx for your help

Regards: Wayne

subz@paradise.net.nz

 

[subz]

P.S what did you mean buy ghost???

 

[HellDiver]

I meant you should engage in spiritualism often, and ask spirits to help you out.

I'm sorry, just couldn't help myself.

Norton Ghost. (Also sold - in Personal Edition, I think - as part of SystemWorks) Allows to back up and restore later entire partitions, disks, etc. including MBRs (IIRC, never use that part myself). Very handy. SysAdmins use it to roll out systems, M$ Windows users use it to have LNG (Last Known Good) installation of their precious system. This way if you screw up the rig by some unfortunate drivers update or something, you can always roll back to your LNG state.

I don't think there's a free version of it, but I do think there's a 30-day trial available for DL, and if you already purchased packages like SystemWorks or simply got a Ghost PE disk as add-on value with some other SW or HW, you may already have it.

As for IRQs, my fault. I thought it went without saying that you should mind PCI slots interrupt sharing (i.e. physically on the board, PCI slots share interrupt lines - INT-A,-B,-C,-D) and IRQs. Sharing is a very bad thing for both, may occasionally work for some cards, but no guarantees. My apologies.

As for the two rigs I'm putting together, so far everything went OK (holding fingers), hard and soft. Just in case, do post your IRQ config, both if I encounter further problems and for other users.