Besweet crushes and resets the PC

[bmb021]

I have a mysteries problem with Besweet.

I’ve installed a brand new machine with WinXP, SP1, DVD2SVCD, PowerDVD and Nero.
The h/w profile:
• Gigabyte 7VRXP (ver2), BIOS-F12
• Athlon XP 2G
• 256MB/333Mhz DDR
• Adaptec 2940UW with 2 18G Seagate drives
• 30G EIDE drive
• Toshiba X16 DVD
• Yamaha CDRW

At the beginning everything worked fine and I successfully converted two DVD titles to SVCD.
Starting with the 3rd title a problem appeared:
The Besweet starts to work and runs for about a minute or so, than the PC resets itself.
The Besweet log file remains empty and the DVD2SCVD log file last entry states that Besweet command line was executed and that’s it.
I’ve repeated the process again and again several times and even tried the titles that I’ve completed successfully in the past.
No dice.
Each time Besweet crushes and resets the PC in the same way.

Out of despair, I’ve launched in my previous hard drive with Win98 SE and to my surprise, everything works fine.
Following the Thread discussions, I’ve checked my PC with Prime95. It checked out fine.

To my best knowledge, the only difference I’ve made to my system before starting the 3rd title was adding second language
support for WinXP.
Could this be the reason? How?
If so, why the Win98 install (that also supports 2nd language) behaves fine?
You advise and assistance is welcomed and much appreciated!

Thanks,
bmb:sly:

[hoozdapimp]

What version of besweet and dvd2svcd are you using?

Scott

[markrb]

In 90% of cases like yours it ends up being a hardware problem.

Find Prime95 and run it for a few hours if you have any problems with it then you have an issue.

In the Q+A there is a link and suggestions for problems very much like yours. It's good reading and advice. I highly recomend checking it out.

Mark

[mkanel]

bmb021

I'm not very familiar with WinXP and I don't know what Prime95 does so this may not apply to your system. Almost every time that something really weird happens when using DVD2SVCD I have been able to fix it by running Scandisk and then re-installing DVD2SVCD.

Good luck. Mike.

[DDogg]

Follow Markrb's advice. People have to get one thing through their heads, BeSweet and CCE stress a machine to its absoulute max ability CPU, ram and Disk I/O wise. Machines that seem perfectly stable can, and will crash when BeSweet is running if they have the slightest problem doing the computations required. This normally arises when cpu speed or memory speed has been tweaked.

One thing to clearly understand is the fact that although your machine may not ever fail under normal use, that DOES NOT mean it is operating without error. The Prime95 torture test is specifically targeted to root out math computation errors. Many of you with machines you would swear are perfect will fail this test. If it fails this test it WILL fail with BeSweet at some stage. Maybe not every time, but it will happen. That's what makes it so damn frustrating and difficult to diagnose. A machine running DVD2SVCD should always be "pre-certified" with the Prime 95 test as well as a memory test like memtest.

Prime 95:
http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm
Memtest:
http://www.memtest86.com/

[JGoodman]

Hi,

it may be just a guess but the same thing happened to me. Just instead of rebooting, WinXP would give me a blue screen very often during the first stage of besweet (and often also when completing big files with a p2p-program). If you rip to your scsi drives, it should not be a problem but if you use your ide drive, you could check the system event viewer to see if you have any ide errors or warnings there. I used to have 2 hard drives on ide1 and 2 optical drives on ide2. Since I put the optical ones on a pci ide card, everything is fine. Looks like my ide2 port is not working right and that must have caused it since I don't have any crashes ever since.

The reason why this is happening with besweet is maybe because during the first pass of besweet, hard drive speed is the limiting factor and it's running on maximum stress. If one error occurs during this phase then xp might blue screen on you and if you set it to reset instead of showing you the blue screen (which I think is the default setting) then the symptoms could be as you described.

If you really suspect something like that you could temporarily disconnect every drive except for your xp system hard disk and try with this system. Could also be a weak psu but you said you didn't change any hardware so it's probably not that.

Anyway, just a guess. Hope you find the reason.

Greetings
JGoodman

[bmb021]

Thank you all for your excellent advises and recommendations.
I’m delighted to let you know that the problem has been found and fixed.
It was the CPU!
For some mysteries reason (to me at least, I’m sure AMD folks will have a better explanation)
this CPU crashed once a first heavy duty tusk like BeSweet was executed.

I’ve noticed this behavior while changing CPU fan speed from “medium” (3500 RPM) to “high” (5500 RPM).
Once operating with high speed cooling fan the crashing disappeared.
CPU’s temperature was at around 41 deg. C in compare to 45 deg. C with medium speed and
the system behaved stable although the high speed fan produced a lot of noise.

I’ve took the “weird” CPU to the shop and they replaced it with a new one.
The new CPU works fine even at medium speed at average temperature of 45-50 deg.
The system is stable as a rock.

BTW, a guy at shop told me that they had numerous returns of 1.8-2G brown plate CPU’s.
The new ones are on a green plate.
It could be some kind of generic manufacturing issue, but I couldn't find anything official to prove this.


:D

[DDogg]

Well, there ya go. Yet again, a Besweet crash is traced back to CPU malfunction. It seems this is always the case, yet it can be a difficult problem to diagnose. bmb021, thanks for letting us know the outcome and setting a good example by "closing the trouble ticket". It is imperative that a person that posts a problem close that thread with the resolution. There is nothing more frustrating that a "one post wonder" who never returns to report their outcome.

bmb021, kudos and a "great job" for tracing this problem and letting us know the potential problem with that batch of CPUs.

[manono]

Hi-

You said you tested with Prime95 already.

I've heard of cases where Prime95 was run with no problems, but the machine crashed during video encoding anyway (because of heat buildup or CPU problems). The reason is usually that Prime95 wasn't run for a full 24 hours. And of course, who wants to tie up their machine for a full day anyway? But, when trying to diagnose this kind of a problem, running Prime95 for 2 or 3 hours isn't near enough.

I recently set up a new system, and it ran the benchmarks and tests with no problem (although I didn't run Prime95). I did some video encoding with CCE, and it blue screened. I turned down the overclock a bit and all was good. To add emphasis to what DDogg said, just because you can run 3D Mark 2001 SE or play Quake 3 all day long with no problems means nothing when it comes to stability for video encoding.

We get this kind of a problem reported in the GKnot Forum from time to time, but unless the poster gives us the right information, it's real hard to diagnose. But if it's a random crash happening all the time, the blame usually lies with an overheating, CPU, or other hardware issue (including O/C tweaks), and not the software used.

And as DDogg said, good for bmb021 (and JGoodman) for reporting how he solved the problem. Someone with a similar problem might search and come across this thread. And as mods, we can always use the knowledge gained to help out the next guy.