Graphics Card or Mobo Problem?

[xwingrogue9]

Problem with my homebuilt system:

Asrock Dual Sata2
AMD 64 4000+
Powercolor x1900xt
WD 160 Gb
2 Gb Corsair Value Ram
Audigy 2 ZS
Win Xp Home SP2

It was working fine for about 3 months and suddenly started acting up. The mouse started freezing and upon reboot, it would just go into continuous reboot. I tried booting in safe mode, nothing. Bios pulls up fine and voltages all look good and so do the temps. It just won't start Windows. (not even from the disk.) I pulled out the VGA card (PCIe) and installed an old AGP card and everything worked fine, but now the same reboot issue is back. Waiting for the RMA on the PCIe card.

Does this sound like a VGA card issue, or Mobo, Hard drive, or something else sinister? (I do have a hardware and software firewall, Antivirus, Adware and spybot protection.)

 

[PCcashCow]

You could have another piece of failing hardware. I would start with the ram, try a single working stick that you know of (any speed). Try swaping out your sata cables and changing the channel. If the bios seems good the problem is in your installdriver configuration.
But start there, strip down to only the VGA card, one stick of ram, and the cpu while your testing.
Also use WD diskett and check out your HDD to see if there are bad sectors or if you have a sick drive.

 

[doolittle]

First thing I would do is check the system logs for strange entries... if nothing out of the ordinary (hopefully it goes back far enough before you had probs) I would grab a copy of knoppix and see if you can recreate the problem in linux - if so you definitely have a hw prob outside of hdd / windows.

Get the UBCD basic version (since it has memtest, prime95 and all hdd diags) and disconnect the hdd and boot off of it. Then go for an overnight memtest - if you get errors, try one dimm at a time, or swap out in another system and confirm failure to rma / replace.
If memtest is good run prime95 overnight as well. If errors here maybe give the cpu heatsink a removal and cleaning, then reinstall w/ some new quality goop and give it a go again, would be nice to confirm failure in anothere 939 system for rma / replacement.

If all is good w/ memtest/prime, run the wd diags, and if nothing your hw is good to go or if you get no errs in linux maybe the wd diags alone from ubcd may turn up some errs but if nothing still maybe you have some windows issues (and missed some log errors or have driver issues?)

 

[shadowduck]

This could be a boot sector virus as well. Try Linux as the other poster suggested and see what happens.