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I think it's dead

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Last response: in Systems
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About a month ago I had a topic going about my computer acting up. Well I picked up a second PSU from my cousin and tried that to fix my lock-ups and such, that didn't exactly fix my problems it only made them occurs less frequently. As I figured I doubted it being the PSU, so Itried a second graphics card in this machine. I have a Nforce4 Ultra chipset but the only g-card I could get my hands on was an ATI card (I don't think that matters). I put that in the machine ran fine, except sometimes it would run a little slow. I didn't know why and I just figured it was because of having an ATI card in an Nvidia chuipset based board.

Now onto my actual problem. I left home for a while yesterday only to come home and find out my computer randomly restarted itself. I tried to boot it up and was acting up giving me weird messages about the registry. Well I knew this was an issue, but I didn't think much of it as I had some things to get down on my computer. So I got up this morning and decided maybe my PSU was really going bad.

I went to swap PSUs and noticed that my 4pin cable was unplugged from the mobo, and i hate to admit it that this probably my problem, and you will all flame me for it, but now my hard drive won't even boot. Every time I try I get blue screen errors like 0x0000000A or 0x0000007B

I've tried everything. I tried reinstalling the OS but everytime I try to do so I get copy errors meaning it can't seem to copy a necessary file from the windows disk. (trust me even though the windows disk is a cd-rw disk, it is not corrupted). Using this disk I am even able to go into a command console type thingy and see the hard drives and the files on them, and I can move, copy, and delete files and folders, but I just cannot get it to boot to the OS.

if you must know I am using a GA-K8N Ultra-9 mobo, and today I updated the bios to the latest F9c (beta), and that didn't help?

I know I'm an idiot for not making sure my 4-pin plug was secure, but looking beyond that fact, is my mobo toast, as in do I need a new one or no?

P.S. I apologize for the long post, and if you need any additional info let me know.

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Well I'll have to copy some files from my main hard drive to one of my other drives then I could try a full reinstall. see I use a 36gig raptor for my OS and hard drive intensive games. I have an 80gig ide and a 320gig SATA II for storage, games, multimedia, etc.

I'll get back to you when I'm done trying this.

Well I'm trying to install windows, but every time I try to install windows I get an error in trying to copy some random file, it's never the same one twice. Sometimes I hit enter to retry and it'll work but most times it won't. It's weird, and at this point I'm not sure what to do.

EDIT - my latest attempt just brought on a BSOD with the following important info

STOP: 0x00000024 (0x001902FE,0xF7CAA9B),0xF7CAA6AC,0xF74565CC)

ntfs.sys - address F74565CC base at F741B000, DateStamp 41107eea
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repair as in use the recovery console or repair as in where I go to the setup screen where I select my partitions and such. Because if I use the latter, it still gives me this random copy errors

Either your motherboard is bad or your cpu is bad and I think it may be your motherboard. And I think your PSU killed it. If you totally wiped the hard drive, as in deleted the partition, then formatted then tried a reinstall and are still getting those kind of errors, you probably have a hardware problem. Leaving that 4 pin plug unplugged wouldn't hurt anything like the previous poster said. I'm surprised it would post without that plugged in.

Anyway, I would remove everything but your keyboard, the drive you are installing to (just disconnecting the others is fine, data cable and power cable), any addon cards and maybe try switching between different sticks of memory to try to root out a possible memory problem. You can always add the memory to full capacity and any addon cards after you get windows installed. Then see if you can install windows, if not, it is either your motherboard or your CPU.

If the install fails, try running Memtest86 on it to see if that reports any problems. And you could also get the respective hard drive diagnostic to check your hard drive to make sure it isn't a hard drive problem. That may narrow down the problem alot.

I can almost say with certainty its a RAM issue, I've had the exact same experience myself with the copy errors and such. Remove one stick, try to reinstall windows, if it fails, try the other stick. If one stick works, stick with it until you can replace the other with the warrenty, or if you'd rather, just buy a new set of ram modules.

Just read the rest of what you said. It IS a ram issue, you need to do what I said in my last post. Its not your CPU/chipset or even the HDD, its your RAM, try it and you'll be up and running in no time.

Quote:
Hehehe, I win! :mrgreen: :trophy:

Why do you win? redraider suggested running memtest. You had a solution, that may or may not work. If that is the fix, just feel good you were right.

I meant that I beat Mpilch to the solution. It's a first for me, let me have my moment! :p 

I'm just joking around...I am pleased to offer some useful help for a change.

Well to my extreme surprise you are correct, I took out the one module, and still had issues, but then I switched them and sure enough all is well, so you are all correct, I have a bad module, however i have not done a memtest yet.

I assume my next logical step would be is to RMA the bad module?

As far as I know it's under warrenty, I have OCZ platinum revision 2 DDR 400 (PC 3200) memory, and I looked on their website and all their memory has a limited lifetime warrenty.

Now two side questions. First: is it entirely possible that this bad memory module was the cause of earlier issues I was having with my games randomly locking up during play.

Secondly, how could this have happened, I mean how could the memory module have gone bad. Did it happen on it's own or was it partly my doing?

As a side note, thank you everyone for your wonderful help.

first, yes very possible
second, yes, if you turn the system on and off, the heat of the system will vary. Also solid state should mean you cannot damage it with vibrations but it can happen. Small faults on the chip can change slowly and get worse as time passes.

I have a theory for that, I'm not a educated in the inner workings of Ram, but I would guess that whenever a game called for the use of any of the faulty sectors in the bad ram you'd run into some problems. This probably happened at random times, and not always in the same place, but usually when action was intense and a large amount of data was being moved.

Ram can die at any point in time often without much warning. Since the ram doesnt need to be completely ruined to not work effectively, it could have slowly degraded over time until enough sectors were bad that any data thrown into them would produce errors. Thus, one day it seems to have just died for no reason, when it really took a fair bit of time for it to get bad enough to cause system instability. Moral of the story, Ram makers know this, which is why they offer lifetime warrenties, for the reasons made clear in this thread.


Edit: What mpilch said :p  he wins the trophy this time
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