over a year and no solution

[MKA]

hi everyone, maybe someone can help.

i built a new pc over a year ago, i bought all the components from scan and cannabilised some parts of my old pc.

for the most part pc works fine, is quick etc but randomly freezes. it occurs roughly once every 2 days, can happen within minutes of windows entering the desktop or hours. pc can be idle or I can be in the middle of something. i have replaced the ram, tested it, stress test the cpu, tried a different graphics card, tried xp instead of windows 7, i tried with only 1 hard drive attached, (as i have several). i have sent the parts back to scan which they tested and they cant find a fault. though they stated they could not test the motherboard as motherboards can't be tested.

the power supply was used for my old pc and was faultless.

interestingly, the pc will never freeze when my screen turn off times out. so when the screen automatically turns off after 30 minutes (how i set it) the freezing problem does not occur.

initially when the pc was first built it would not freeze but restart and state a hyper transport flood sync error. asus released a bios update to fix this and i updated to that bios which then gave me the freezing problem. i have tried a few other bios versions but they seem to make no difference or make the system unstable. and nothing is overclocked, everything is at default.

any suggestions?

(specs listed in"MKA's system" on left)

[IAmATeaf]

So does it freeze and then come back to life or is it a case of goodnight Vienna?

[Domestic_Ginger]

I had problems similar and it was an IRQ conflict. I can't remember much I'm afraid as this back in the Athlon / windows 2000 days and I thought even XP cured this.

In admin tools there is a way to view IRQs and there may be devices sharing and conflicting.

If you are on IDE devices are they set to master and slave or auto etc.

[IAmATeaf]

I had problems similar and it was an IRQ conflict. I can't remember much I'm afraid as this back in the Athlon / windows 2000 days and I thought even XP cured this.

In admin tools there is a way to view IRQs and there may be devices sharing and conflicting.

If you are on IDE devices are they set to master and slave or auto etc.

IRQ conflicts, boy that takes me back to the good old DOS days when devices had jumpers to set their base IO address, IRQ and maybe even DMA

With a modern day mobo and OS running ACPI IRQ conflicts should in theory be a thing of the past as ACPI allows IRQs to be shared but it might be an idea to have a look at the mobo manual and see which PCI/PCI-E slots share IRQ with what and then move any addon cards so that at least they don't share an IRQ with the vid card. But from the system it doesn't look like there are any add on card?

Only other thing that I can think of is to do a BIOS reset but as you've updated the BIOS I'm sure you've already done that.

[twosheds]

Interesting... I was having this problem a few months ago.

When I rebooted I would often get various 0x???????? errors, all pointing to HD problems. SeaTools tested the drives and gave a clear OK. Sometimes after reboot it would give missing file errors too and fail to boot.

I even bought a new HD and thought the problem had gone away, then after a month it started again.

In the end, I changed ALL the SATA data cables and, touch wood, it's been running fine ever since (several months).

[MKA]

thank you for all your responses, much apprecited.

IAmATeaf, when it freezes I have to use the power button to turn off and restart and then the pc will work fine again. I dont have any add on cards either, and yep I have reset the bios.

Domestic Ginger, I am running no IDE devices at all.

Twosheds, I have swapped the sata cables about, but after reading your post, I ordered a few new ones, just in case.

I have also formatted the pc, and added no additional software, no anti virus or anything and it still eventually froze.

[MaddAussie]

are all the drives running off of the same power rail? I had something similar (admittedly it was with old IDE drives many moons ago) once I split the drives between two rails I all my issues disappeared

[MKA]

Interesting... I was having this problem a few months ago.

When I rebooted I would often get various 0x???????? errors, all pointing to HD problems. SeaTools tested the drives and gave a clear OK. Sometimes after reboot it would give missing file errors too and fail to boot.

I even bought a new HD and thought the problem had gone away, then after a month it started again.

In the end, I changed ALL the SATA data cables and, touch wood, it's been running fine ever since (several months).

genius mate, cannot believe i bloody tested everything and never thought of replacing the sata cables , replaced every single sata cable and my problem has not occured since. roughly 2 - 3 weeks now. thanks alot twosheds

[pipTheGeek]

Glad you got your PC fixed.
I DETEST trying to diagnose unstable PC issues...
And, having just built the in-laws a PC (to replace their 2.6GHz Northwood based Celeron) it blue screened twice in the hour or so that it took me to finish the setting up at their house. Didn't error once while I was building it.
Just to make it more interesting, the HDD is from their old PC (but is fairly new) and the PSU is an old one. Does it being old make it better or worse? Its previous PC worked fine but it hasn't been asked to power anything for 6 months.
I see some fun times in my future...

[merdat]

Bought a new dvd writer a couple of weeks ago. First disc failed at 65% second at 85% . Just about to try the drive in another machine when I thought--change the 'sata cable' --no problems since.

[MKA]

i spoke too soon, it happened again

[merdat]

Have you changed the 'battery' on that motherboard. A failing battery can give you a lot of funny thing happening.

[ehhhhhhh]

i spoke too soon, it happened again

in my experience, memory problems or bad sectors on the HDD can cause this.

Have you run a full scan on the HDD for bad sectors?

also, try to run memtest, it's the best memory testing tool I think.

[alsenior]

have you tried a different power supply as they do tend to degrade over time