Help!

[CRH7386]

Hey guys, I really need your help. I built my system like 9 months ago or so. Everything has been fine till now. I had my e8400 overclocked to 3.6ghz so it wasn't too much. I got Fallout 3 not too long ago and it was giving me lots of problems. It was shutting down and sometimes running really slow even on the lowest settings possible. I have SLI with 2 8800 GTS's (512mB) so it should run well. I uninstalled the game and was going to restart the computer and then reinstall it but when i restarted it, after i logged on the windows (Vista Home Premium), It gave me a BSOD, something about hardware error call your vendor. Also, when I hit the restart button, it was slow to do anything and gave an error that said windows explorer not responding and then restarted a few seconds later. I don't know if that will mean anything or not. So anyways, it restarted right away after the BSOD so I couldn't get much information so I tried restarting it again and I got the same BSOD again. So when I restarted again, I went into the bios and set everything back to default and only adjusted the settings for my raid so it could boot up windows. Then i restarted it and it still gave me the same BSOD. I tried to restart to look at the BIOS again and it just came up to the info page before the bios and said it was in safe mode and i must reset cpu or memory frequency. So I restarted again and ran in safe mode. Safe mode seems to work fine. So I defaulted the bios again and now when I start windows, I can log on and everything starts to load and after like 10 seconds it just freezes but no BSOD. I used Mem Test and the memory is good so I'm guessing its the CPU or motherboard. I'm not really sure what to do here since I don't have any extra parts to swap out. Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Zenthar]

Have you tried with only a single 8800 card at a time, maybe something happened to the PSU and now it doesn't give-out enough power. Or maybe you got one of those "short lived" 8800 caused by Nvidia screwed-up manufacturing.

 

[zodiacfml]

hard disk or a power supply problem.
you should borrow parts to single out the problem. start first with the psu.

 

[serpent1202]

CRH7386,

I agree with zodiacfml. I would lean more towards CPU because logging into windows isn't really a strain on any components so your PSU shouldn't have a problem getting in.

It sounds like your hard drive is trying to access a bad sector during regular windows boot and it freezes, but doesn't access those files to get into safe mode so it boots without a problem.

Here is the solution assuming your running windows xp.. I am sure there is also a similiar solution with vista, but I can't speak to it

Insert the xp disc and enter setup. When you are prompted hit R to repair. You will enter a recovery console that allows you to enter dos commands.

Run CHKDISK /p or \p, I don't remember which way the slash goes off the top of my head.

This will run a thorough check of your hard disk for any bad sectors. If it goes 100%, then your HD is fine and this is not your problem. I'm guessing its going to stop and tell you something like error, ran into a unrepairable sector or something like that.

Hope this helps.

 

[CRH7386]

well, i tried doing each graphics card on their own and that didn't help. It's still freezing. I did the chkdsk and it said there were no problems found. So I guess I need to find another power supply somewhere to try it out.