Hardware failure?

[haelduksf]

Having problems now for a bit over a month with my WinXP machine, but exams have prevented me from fixing it up until now. The specs are as follows:

DFI AD-73 Pro mobo W/ KT266A chipset
Athlon 1900+
Sapphire Radeon 8500 LE 128
256mb Samsung DDR266
3 HDDs, 1 LG Combo Drive
350w Enermax EG365P-VE
Audigy OEM
Network Everywhere NC100 (Linksys chipset)

Here's what happens:

When I attempt to boot the machine, I get the same BSOD in the same place, almost every time: 0x000000D1 (Driver_IRQL_Not_Less_Or_Equal) before the black & white progress bar. Sometimes it tells me that either Win32k.sys or ACPI.sys are the files that failed, but usually there's no file identified. If I reboot the computer 10-20x, I eventually get to the desktop. Then I get what seems to be a random stop error selected from 0x00000024, 0x000000C2, 0x0000008e and 0x00000050. If I reboot once or twice after that, I can usually get an unstable but usable boot. Some other things I've noticed: it takes a lot longer to boot now (5-7x as long as before) and is generally sluggish. Certain programs cause it to crash immediately (BitComet, SP2 install), while some programs only crash/freeze it occasionally (Firefox, spoolsrv (!)).

So far I have tried:
-Swapping out the HDD, NIC, Sound Card, Power Supply and RAM
-Flashing, resetting and clearing BIOS
-Reinstalling Windows
-Installing Gentoo (Couldn't even begin install, got kernel panic "IRQ not synching- fatal exception in interrupt")
-Pulling every component except CPU, RAM and GPU
-Cleaning CPU HSF
-Checking system logs
-Running Scandisk

I'm pretty much out of ideas at this point. It would be a major pain to get another graphics card and/or CPU to try swapping those out, so I'd rather not.

Anyone have any ideas?

 

[haelduksf]

Nothing?

 

[sykopath79]

DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL sounds like a software issue of some kind. Most likely a misbehaving/buggy device driver.

See if any of the Microsoft KB articles here pertain to your situation. I always end up fishing through Google and the M$ knowledge base when I am confronted with BSODs.

 

[haelduksf]

Pretty sure it's not software related- I did a complete reinstall of Windows, redid every driver. Neither Gentoo nor Ubunto liveCDs work.

As far as I can tell, all the BSODs I'm getting pertain to IRQ errors of one sort or another, and the solution in the KB is just to remove the last hardware you installed :S

*EDIT* there seems to be "one KB article" which applies, but the fix is to install Sp2, which crashes my machine.

 

[yaleblor]

here's a link to what that bsod code means and how to fix it http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=317326
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/docu.../XP/all/reskit/en-us/prmd_stp_swhw.asp

if you copy the bsod code and google it you'll be taken to ms site that explains what it is and how to fix it

 

[haelduksf]

A) I don't have any USB devices plugged in and the BSOD does not occur when I shut down the computer
B) None of the advice on the KB is relevant except the suggestion to install SP2, which is not possible; it crashes windows. See the two posts above yours.

And give me some credit, man- I know what google is