Several problems immediately after changing some hardware

[jason2189]

I had built a mineral oil cooled computer (totally not worth it, btw) and it stopped working. I de-mineral oiled it and put it into a regular case. The heat spreaders on the RAM were falling off because the mineral oil made the rubbery stuff swell up and the adhesive dissolve. So I installed the RAM that was in the computer before I upgraded. I had 16 GB, have 4 GB now. After doing that, I could once again hear the beeps from the speaker - eight of them. So I put in the video card I had in the computer before I upgraded. It's a Radeon 5700 (5770?), I'm not sure the model of the failed one but it was also an ATI chipset (7xxx?)

So I turn the computer on and everything seems good. All the startup programs load and it took the normal amount of time. I tried to play a game of StarCraft II and it would not load. There was a popup message about the paging file - I had used Asrock's Xfast RAM to make a virtual drive that I put the page file on because there was still a page file on one HDD when I set the size to zero. Since I don't have RAM to spare right now, I set the page file to system managed. Since those changes aren't saved until restarting, I clicked restart thinking it couldn't hurt to restart. The computer shut off. Only the fans and power light would come on. No beeps, the power lights on my monitors stayed orange (no input). That was at 4am this morning, so I went to bed. After coming home today, I tried once more to turn it on before throwing it back into the oil and setting it all on fire. So here I am typing instead of explaining myself to the firemen...

Last night I only tried starting StarCraft, but after trying more stuff, Steam will not load. Path of Exile seems to hang on the load screen, I never really played it, and I remember it did take a while, but it's said "checking resources" for five minutes now. Several of my programs won't save a file to any disk or flash drive. They give various messages, Freemaker says the HDDs are full (400-some GB free across 3 drives), 7zip says there's no file selected when I hit extract, Paint says the save process was interrupted. Firefox can download just fine. I can move files between drives, I can defragment.

Device manager recognizes all the correct hardware and there are no error messages.

What could cause so many different programs to have problems? The HDDs are all the same, possibly plugged in to different connectors, but they all seem to be fine as far as reading/writing in Explorer.

Thanks for any help
-Jason


Edit: One additional thought... C: is definately plugged into the same connector it was before, which is where StarCraft is installed

 

[jFiveNYC]

Have you tried rolling back to or recovering from a Windows Restore Point? Obviously a point that was created prior to you manipulating the pagefile settings.

Do you think the RAM could have been physically damaged during the rebuild? You could try running a thorough and comprehensive memory test, called MemTest86. It will run off the disc/USB drive and does not require you to boot into Windows OS.

http://www.memtest.org/

Can I twist the knife? Don't put the pagefile on a RAMdisk. http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

 

[USAFRet]

I had built a mineral oil cooled computer (totally not worth it, btw) and it stopped working.

Why did it stop working originally?

 

[jason2189]

Well... I figured it out. Apparently lacking the RAM drive was causing the problem. I got an error message while trying to download memtest, no matter where I tried to save, I got an error message about not finding X:\. I turned it back on at 256 MB and everything seems back to normal. There is nothing on it but temporary internet files. Any idea why that would matter for the games and all the disk I/O issues?

I read about the ups and downs of the page file on the RAM drive before doing it... it really does make the computer a lot faster. With 16GB I've never seen less than 3 GB in Standby Memory. That's with the RAM drive taking 4 GB of RAM even though it's mostly empty.


I believe the video card is what caused it to stop working. For my BIOS, 8 beeps is video card. I thought I could maybe hear quite a few beeps while it was in the mineral oil, but it muffled it so much I really couldn't tell. I will clean it in alcohol again, let it dry and try it out. I read that mineral oil will damage some cheaper capacitors... I think I'll try soldering in new caps if cleaning it doesn't work. I saw the heat spreader issue after I removed the RAM to clean it off, they were touching each other but not enough to twist the RAM in the sockets. I think that RAM will be fine after I get new thermal stuff and get the heat spreaders back on.

Thanks for the input!