System hangs

[nugget]

As most of you know I've been building my new pc. It seems now that I have a problem and it's driving me nuts not knowing where to look. The system hangs, just hangs, at any time. When I got the pc all set up I installed XP Pro. I then installed all the drivers needed for the motherboard and graphics card. I then went to install a game (crysis) and halfway through it hung itself. Reset, try again and the same result. I tried another game (stalker) with the same results.

Even in safe mode it didn't want to go any further. I had applied all the updates to the system before trying to install the games so I thought it must be one of the patches that is making it hang. I re-installed the system, this time with XP Pro 64 bit without any updates. I tried to install a game and it went through without a problem. I then put on all the necessary drivers and some updates.

The system still hangs. I tried installing the rest of the available updates and it hung itself 3 times at different areas and It also had problems installing some of the patches, something which I have rarely seen. After a little surfing tonight I went to type in a site name and when I pressed enter the whole screen went black and the system hung itself again.

Now (after restarting yet again) and a little more surfing I left it for a short time and it has hung itself again (while doing nothing).

Other things that I have noticed but may or may not be relevant:
it boots faster with the secondary IDE disks plugged in than it does with the cd-rom plugged in
for a quad core 2.66GHz I expected it to be "faster" more so than my Athlon XP 2600+ but it seems about the same
all the hardware (see my sig for the specs) "seems" to be working according to the device manager and all the right drivers are there
I flashed the bios with the most up to date version which added support for my cpu
it is very slow to install anything


Any time I do a search for anything about my components I come up mostly with reviews telling me how great they are. Any problems are usually related to overclockers having problems to get from 3.2 GHZ to 3.4 etc for the motherboard and cpu. There is nothing in the logs to give any clue either.

Any help greatly appreciated.

[greenbrucelee]

Seems to me you have a bad bottleneck somewhere i'ts finding it thats the challenge.

You don't happen to have one of the newest lines of Asus motherboard do you?

[Bluerinse]

Do you have a SATA hard drive Nugg and if so was there a floppy with SATA drivers on it? You can get stuff like this happening sometimes with certain SATA controllers. try booting from a bootable OS like BartPE or Linux and giving it some burn in tests, disconnect the HDDs, my guess is it'll be fine.

[nugget]

Originally Posted by greenbrucelee

You don't happen to have one of the newest lines of Asus motherboard do you?

I seem to have the latest models (released in the last couple of months) for all my components.

The graphics card and mainboard were released around december (I think) and cpu last week.

[nugget]

Originally Posted by Bluerinse

Do you have a SATA hard drive Nugg and if so was there a floppy with SATA drivers on it? You can get stuff like this happening sometimes with certain SATA controllers. try booting from a bootable OS like BartPE or Linux and giving it some burn in tests, disconnect the HDDs, my guess is it'll be fine.

It does have SATA disks but no floppy (not supplied any more). I haven't tried with a bootable disk yet. Any preferences to a distro that has some diagnosing capabilities included?

EDIT: I know that sometimes I've needed to add drivers at the start of an install but I was surprised that the system found and recognised the disks and started installing like normal. It did take a lot of time changing between 'pages' of the start up routine (loading system files -> eula acceptance -> setup routine took roughly a minute between each step)

[greenbrucelee]

Originally Posted by nugget

I seem to have the latest models (released in the last couple of months) for all my components.

The graphics card and mainboard were released around december (I think) and cpu last week.

A friend of mine recently bought the Asus Striker extreme 2 mobo and he went to flash the bios, unfortuantely the bios update was faulty and he was getting system lockups anmd eventually his system wouldn't work. Asus replaced his mobo as it was their fault.

If you have updated the bios I would check with Asus tech support to see if there is an issue with the updates for that particular board.

[Mathematix]

Instead of guesswork, try looking at the event logs to see what is happening:

Start -> Control Panel -> (Category View) Performance and Maintenace -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer

See what it says when you go through each category. It should at least give you a very good clue.

Also, right-click on any warnings or error to read the full story with error codes that you can google.

[greenbrucelee]

Originally Posted by Mathematix

Instead of guesswork, try looking at the event logs to see what is happening:

Start -> Control Panel -> (Category View) Performance and Maintenace -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer

See what it says when you go through each category. It should at least give you a very good clue.

Also, right-click on any warnings or error to read the full story with error codes that you can google.

good idea

[Sparky]

Is there a BIOS update available?

Does the mobo support IDE devices? If so perhaps try installing on a IDE HD as it may be an issue with the SATA controller driver.

[nugget]

Originally Posted by Mathematix

Instead of guesswork, try looking at the event logs to see what is happening:

Start -> Control Panel -> (Category View) Performance and Maintenace -> Administrative Tools -> Event Viewer

See what it says when you go through each category. It should at least give you a very good clue.

Also, right-click on any warnings or error to read the full story with error codes that you can google.

I've done it already. Most of it looks normal except for the warnings that relate to all the failed update installations.

[Mathematix]

Originally Posted by nugget

I've done it already. Most of it looks normal except for the warnings that relate to all the failed update installations.

That's a problem. Why are they failing?

[nugget]

Originally Posted by Sparky

Is there a BIOS update available?

Does the mobo support IDE devices? If so perhaps try installing on a IDE HD as it may be an issue with the SATA controller driver.

I have the latest bios update.

The idea about installing on a IDE disk is good. I'll bring one home tomorrow. As with all modern creations, the old standard seem to be slowly phased out. This mobo has only one IDE connector so a little jiggery pokery will be required with the cables.

[Sparky]

Originally Posted by nugget

I have the latest bios update.

The idea about installing on a IDE disk is good. I'll bring one home tomorrow. As with all modern creations, the old standard seem to be slowly phased out. This mobo has only one IDE connector so a little jiggery pokery will be required with the cables.

I had a similar problem with an old low spec server I was rebuilding, I installed the OS and it detected the SATA drives but the whole install was ‘slow’. After the install the server would blue screen, hang etc so I had to find the manufacturer’s pre-install disk which basically configured the SATA raid card with manufacturer’s driver. Problem solved!

If you try with an IDE drive and it works ok then it *looks* like an issue with the SATA drive, cable or driver.

[nugget]

Originally Posted by Mathematix

That's a problem. Why are they failing?

Most of them say (after following the codes) that the installation failed due to BITS being turned off (set to manual startup), I don't know how this happened or why. A bunch of others give the event ID 0.

A whole bunch of the warnings relate to installing .net framework v2 (event id 0) Also, since when does IIS need to be installed as a pre-requisite to the framework being installed?

Originally Posted by Mathematix

Instead of guesswork, .......

This is what I mean by it's driving me nuts. There are so many little things for so many areas that I can't pin it down and I have to guess.

A wild stab in the dark, could it be that XP Pro (as a client system) just has problems with the newest quad core cpus? Would a server system work any better as they are designed for multiple cpu usage?