I have been pulling my hair out for a week now. I bought a Dragon Lite KT333 board, with a Duron 1.2 gHz (to tide me over until I can afford a better processor), with 256 MB DDR PC2100 RAM (one stick). I slapped it all together fairly easily (this is my first time doing this) and connected it to a 300W power supply. I have an old 8.1 GB HDD with WinXP already installed on it I took from my old computer, a 30 GB HDD that I only use for storage and Linux (which incidentally I'm forced to boot into now, and I'll get to that later), a 5x DVD drive, my 3.5" floppy, and a USB Zip CD-RW drive. I also have a PCI Voodoo4 4500 card and a Linksys ethernet card (in the bottom most slots). Everything is correctly connected and after repairing my Windows install, I can boot. However, it is NOT stable. At first no lockups, then as time went on and I started locking up more. So I fiddled with my BIOS and with some help from a friend, I managed to use the optimized defaults without video shadowing (or whatever it's called) and it stayed up all last night and half of today. Then suddenly in the middle of playing a game, it locked up and Windows will not stay up longer than a few minutes after the diskcheck (if it even gets past that). I put all the settings in the bios back to the fail-safe (and disabled the shadowing thing) and it still will not stay booted long enough to do much of anything. I'm booted into Linux and that's where I'm typing from now, as Linux doesn't seem to have ever locked up since I upgraded my motherboard. I can load the optimized and fail-safe, and Linux still has no troubles. Also, my system is running around 45 degrees C (which is something like 110 F I believe), so I'm fairly positive I'm not overheating. I have the lastest BIOS and the latest VIA4in1 and sound card drivers for XP. XP Home is fully updated, too. One last thing, it SEEMED (for a while anyway), that when I was in PIO transfer mode, I was locking up less, but running very slowly. Then last night I found out about the shadowing thing and turned DMA back on (I think my secondary drive (secondary master) was in mode 5, my DVD (secondary slave) and main drives (primary master) were in mode 2), and it ran beautifully... until just a little while ago when I broke down and decided to ask for help rather than read other people's experiences. I really am at my wit's end with this.
If it was me, I would have reformated the hard drive and installed XP again to get rid of all the old hardware junk in the registry. Then get the updates for XP. When done do a defrag.
As far as the BIOS goes I would go through the book that came with the motherboard and read all the settings for the BIOS and see what you need to do for the parts you have. Correct settings for the CPU, right FSB, right memory settings and go easy on the settings (like CAS3 instead of CAS 2 for now) there until you have it running good.
The CPU temp is good. One last thing. Go get the latest driver for your video card, and are you sure this old drive is OK? Maybe the maker of the drive has software tests (I have IBM's and they have a fitness test) you can download.
probably back up all your work and format your hdisk, then reinstall XP again. reintall the update and all drivers, video card, directx, mobo chipset, sound, modem.. what ever
Ugh, reformatting is the last option... I absolutely hate to go through all that. But then, my current install was updated from 98, from an embarrassing eMachine, lol. So maybe that's a good idea. But actually, I think I might have found the problem... I was trying to boot just now, and it was locking up at the welcome screen of XP. So I went into the bios and turned off the option to assign IRQ to VGA, and it went all the way in. I've been up for 30 minutes so far (too early to tell, I know), but it's an improvement over the 45 seconds I was getting. Thanks a lot for you suggestions, though. If I do lockup again, I'll just take all weekend and backup and format. Thanks again!
using a Windows install from your other machine to your new one is a perfect road for trouble. Especially if the other was using a different chipset and/or CPU. So you should reformat and reinstall Windows.
My dragon board simply refuse to crash. The most stable I never had.
-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!
