<intrepid***@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:1123636220.660934.191530@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> All:
>
> I have a home-brew box built about five years ago to run Windows 2000.
> It has served primarily as a host for a printer and a development
> database, and in that time has run flawlessly...well, until the last
> very few months.
>
> During that time, the box started - perhaps once every two weeks -
> crashing. It would always immediately reboot normally. Unfortunately, I
> never took the time to thoroughly diagnose it.
>
> Over time, the crashes became more frequent, and now the machine will
> not start up Windows 2000 entirely. It will get to the W2K startup GUI
> screen (with the "Starting Up" progress bar,) but will usually hang or
> (sometimes) crash (BSOD) just as it begins to display the startup login
> dialog. The crashes have ranged from IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL to
> UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP and have occurred in NTOSKRNL.EXE, HAL.DLL,
> and ATAPI.SYS (to name just a few).
>
> The machine will not boot into safe mode - hangs at the login dialog or
> during the "Windows is starting..." dialog, but then freeze.
>
> I have been able to start the machine from the CD-ROM and the W2K
> installation CD into the Recovery Console - which always works (done
> several times) - and ran a chkdsk which found no problems. I ran a Fast
> Repair which, unfortunately, froze at 6 seconds before reboot. Upon
> rebooting, W2K still froze as it had been.
>
> Hardware: This is a VA-503A motherboard with an AMD k6-2 CPU @ 500Mhz
> with (originally) 128MB of PC100 SDRAM, a generic soundcard, and a
> generic 10/100 NIC, a Stealth 540 AGP video card (32MB), and a 13GB
> Quantum Bigfoot hard drive.
>
> The hardware steps I've taken so far include the following:
> * Removal of NIC
> * Removal of sound card
> * Removal/swap of memory with known good memory
> * Change of video card
> * Replacement of power supply
> * Reset of BIOS to defaults
> * Move of boot drive to different cable
> * Move of boot drive to different IDE interface
> * Elimination of all hardware but hard drive and CD-ROM drive
>
> System BIOS indicates the CPU temp is normal, and aside from the one
> freeze in character mode during the emergency repair, all
> character-mode operations have worked normally. ONly the transition
> from "Starting Up" to "show the logon dialog" does the system
> crash/hang hard.
>
> I'm *this* close to a fresh format and restart install, but part of me
> is concerned that the motherboard may, in fact, be failing, as I
> suspect the crash is happening when the OS is trying to allocate
> resources from the system, but the system is balking. If that's the
> case, obviously a system rebuild won't do any good. For now, I'm going
> to give a parallel installation of W2K a try and see what happens.
>
> I've run out of ideas to try on this problem, and I'd greatly
> appreciate any ideas that I may have overlooked or not considered
> properly. I realize this is an older box, and I'll readily acknowledge
> that it isn't the most critical in the world, but there is some
> information on it I'd like to recover if possible (but its not the end
> of the world if I don't).
>
> Thanks in advance for your kind suggestions and assistance.
>
> -David
>
> p.s. Please reply to this group; email listed in this message is no
> longer active.
>

> If you're sure it isn't a thermal or power supply issue I'm afraid your
> motherboard's power regulation is likely the problem. This is common
> as boards age, especially the early Athlon boards which had some
> really (for that time) astonishing power requirements. The symptoms you
> describe match up with what we typically see for this.
>
> Replacing or repairing a board of this vintage isn't usually
> worth the trouble, though it can be done.
>
> Assuming this is an IDE-based machine, I'd change the drivers
> to "Standard dual IDE/ATAPI" and just change out the board,
> CPU and memory and call it an "upgrade"
>
> Steve Duff, MCSE, MVP
> Ergodic Systems, Inc.
>
> <intrepid***@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:1123636220.660934.191530@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
> > All:
> >
> > I have a home-brew box built about five years ago to run Windows 2000.
> > It has served primarily as a host for a printer and a development
> > database, and in that time has run flawlessly...well, until the last
> > very few months.
> >
> > During that time, the box started - perhaps once every two weeks -
> > crashing. It would always immediately reboot normally. Unfortunately, I
> > never took the time to thoroughly diagnose it.
> >
> > Over time, the crashes became more frequent, and now the machine will
> > not start up Windows 2000 entirely. It will get to the W2K startup GUI
> > screen (with the "Starting Up" progress bar,) but will usually hang or
> > (sometimes) crash (BSOD) just as it begins to display the startup login
> > dialog. The crashes have ranged from IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL to
> > UNEXPECTED_KERNEL_MODE_TRAP and have occurred in NTOSKRNL.EXE, HAL.DLL,
> > and ATAPI.SYS (to name just a few).
> >
> > The machine will not boot into safe mode - hangs at the login dialog or
> > during the "Windows is starting..." dialog, but then freeze.
> >
> > I have been able to start the machine from the CD-ROM and the W2K
> > installation CD into the Recovery Console - which always works (done
> > several times) - and ran a chkdsk which found no problems. I ran a Fast
> > Repair which, unfortunately, froze at 6 seconds before reboot. Upon
> > rebooting, W2K still froze as it had been.
> >
> > Hardware: This is a VA-503A motherboard with an AMD k6-2 CPU @ 500Mhz
> > with (originally) 128MB of PC100 SDRAM, a generic soundcard, and a
> > generic 10/100 NIC, a Stealth 540 AGP video card (32MB), and a 13GB
> > Quantum Bigfoot hard drive.
> >
> > The hardware steps I've taken so far include the following:
> > * Removal of NIC
> > * Removal of sound card
> > * Removal/swap of memory with known good memory
> > * Change of video card
> > * Replacement of power supply
> > * Reset of BIOS to defaults
> > * Move of boot drive to different cable
> > * Move of boot drive to different IDE interface
> > * Elimination of all hardware but hard drive and CD-ROM drive
> >
> > System BIOS indicates the CPU temp is normal, and aside from the one
> > freeze in character mode during the emergency repair, all
> > character-mode operations have worked normally. ONly the transition
> > from "Starting Up" to "show the logon dialog" does the system
> > crash/hang hard.
> >
> > I'm *this* close to a fresh format and restart install, but part of me
> > is concerned that the motherboard may, in fact, be failing, as I
> > suspect the crash is happening when the OS is trying to allocate
> > resources from the system, but the system is balking. If that's the
> > case, obviously a system rebuild won't do any good. For now, I'm going
> > to give a parallel installation of W2K a try and see what happens.
> >
> > I've run out of ideas to try on this problem, and I'd greatly
> > appreciate any ideas that I may have overlooked or not considered
> > properly. I realize this is an older box, and I'll readily acknowledge
> > that it isn't the most critical in the world, but there is some
> > information on it I'd like to recover if possible (but its not the end
> > of the world if I don't).
> >
> > Thanks in advance for your kind suggestions and assistance.
> >
> > -David
> >
> > p.s. Please reply to this group; email listed in this message is no
> > longer active.
> >