Win2k random reboot problems and crashes

[elliotjo]

I put together a new system about a month ago with a 1.4 Athlon on a Shuttle AK31 and the MSI Geforce card. I initially installed Win98 but switched to Win2k for the first time a few days ago. I've been having an occaisonal problem where the computer will suddenly reboot. It doesn't go through the shutdown sequence, its more like just hitting the reset button.
I've also been having a problem with the machine locking up while running quake 3, usually it happens when running a mod. I didn't run into either of these problems under 98.
Any suggestions or ideas on what is messing up?

thanks,
Elliot

 

[agnitrate]

I should just make like an auto post for this. First, what kind of P/S do you have? Is it AMD Aprvd? Do you have a spare to test to eliminate this as your prob?

silver

 

[SPB]

Does that mobo have a via chip set? This among other things could be causing some of your probs. Go Here to get info on your game freezing and a possible cause. As for the reboots, this may be a stupid question, but are all of your drivers up to date? Did you install ONLY WINDOWS 2000 DRIVERS (not yelling just streesing the point) for all devices? Disable APM (Advanced Power Managment) in your bios and set it to stay off after power loss. Don't use stand-by or hibernate and set your hard drive to always stay on. Most likely this is not your PS, unless its less than 150 watts, although to play it "safe" you would want to have something like 300. This could be happening due to a heating issue so check all aplicable componets for over heating. Are you overclocking anything? Just some hints and tips from a newbie

 

[elliotjo]

Its the enlight 300W power supply that came with the case. I'm powering the motherboard, cpu, CPU fan, 1 agp card w/ cooling fan, 1 lan card, 1 soundcard, 2cd drives, 2 hds, one 3.5 floppy and one 5.25 floppy. I wondered if it were the power supply but I thought it unlikely since this started with win2k.
No, the only other 2 AT p/s I have are the same model.

thanks,
Elliot

 

[elliotjo]

Yes, the mobo has the VIA KT266 chipset. But one of the first things I did after installing the os, lan card, and video card, was to apply service pack 2, so that patch you linked to should have already been applied. I tried downloading it but it said it could only be applied to sp1. Now that I think of it, I may have installed the via 4in1 drivers after SP2. Would that have overwritten the patched AGP driver with the buggy one? Maybe I should try uninstalling the service pack and reinstalling it to make sure.
I did install the 2000 drivers for everything, except this USB quickcam which doesn't seem to like win2k. I'll try the disabling APM, I'd forgotten about that. I lost so much time trying to fix problems that eventually turned out to be from APM back when it first appeared in win98.
I'm almost sure it's not a heating issue. The mobo comes with a fan on the northbridge. After a few weeks the fan started to make death noises(its a cheap weak fan and hs) and the air coming off it felt way to hot to me, so I have the case side off and large fan pointed right the chipset and graphics card.

elliot

 

[SPB]

It most deffinately would have over written the existing agp driver. I installed the service packs and "stuff" after installing the via4in1. I've had a few probs with UT. The first time I played it the game locked up and I had to do a hard reboot. The first time I tried to get on the net with it the same thing happend. Nothing since then. Check your event log and see if you can't get any info there that might help. Thats in administrative tools.

 

[elliotjo]

I uninstalled SP2 and reinstalled it. That all went smoothly except the uninstaller program had trouble restoring one of the older dlls. I told it to skip it and the rest of the uninstall was fine. Unfortunately, even after reinstalling SP2, its still locking up. I went into bios and changed the AGP bus to 2x from 4x to see if that would help, but it didn't. Have any bios settings suggestions? Its odd, I keep trying it out with the Urban terror mod on quake 3, it usually crashes while still in the menus, long before the game actually does any 3d rendering. The event logs show nothing, thanks for that tip though, its so weird to actually have windows tell me details about what goes wrong.
Is there any way to check that the new AGP controller was installed and the old one is gone?

elliot

 

[SPB]

I think I just found the answer to the problem. Aparently when something is running in agp mode and you have windows 2000 and an AMD proc you may experience lockups. Here is a link to where you can download the fix (Patch for AGP Applications on AMD Athlon & Duron Processors). I installed the patch, its just a auto registry entry thing that adds a new value to the mem managment key in your registry. Here is the MS info on the prob and the fix LINK. This should fix your prob, and mine After adding the key you MUST restart the pc before the change will take effect, this goes for all reg changes. Good luck.

PS: Don't try adding the key yourself, I tried and the vaule data entry "box" wouldn't allow me to add the "xfffff" part of the value. I checked the reg after auto adding the value and all was well.

 

[SaigonK]

The reason your PC is rebooting on it's own is because you have the "Automatic Reboot" feature after a Blue Screen of Death turned on.

Alot of people miss this and never see their BSOD error because the system goes right into a restart.

To turn it off go here:

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Advanced Tab ->
Select the "Startup And Recovery" Button
Under "System Failure" remove the check from "Automatically Reboot"

There ya go..solves 1/2 the prob you're having, now I would check into what the others said about AGP etc etc

 

[JayBone]

Sounds like you may have fixed the problem already, but I found that urban terror for Q3A was locking my system until I dl'd v2.2. I'm running Q3A 1.29h.

 

[Need4Speed]

have you checked the event log? it will generally give a good indication of why you are BSODing

 

[elliotjo]

After applying that registry entry I had Quake3 and urban terror crash on me a few times, along with an explorer.exe error after I rebooted from applying the key. But then I did manage to play urban terror for an hour without any lock-ups. Quake3 however, I can't get to start a game because it claims one of the JPEG files is corrupt. I think this is part of another issue I'm having. Sometimes I'll download a patch or installation program and when I run the program usually quits out saying the file was corrupted or a CRC error. But then if I keep trying to run the installer, it eventually works. Usually on the secont try, but sometimes two or three attempts are needed. I saw the service pack 2 addressed some issues with ATA-100 harddrives, but it didn't look to be related to file corruption.
The harddrives are two Seagate Barracudas, IDE, 80G each. The first one is an NTFS partition that was formated when I installed 2k. The second is a FAT32 that is used to save most of my data so I would still have it after installing 2k. Files on both drives exhibit the same behavior.
Automatic reboot on BSOD was set, so I changed that. Thanks for that tip.

Thanks for all the help so far,
Elliot