system freeze/crashes, dunno why, help anyone?

[takeru]

heres the layout of my system:

athlon xp 1700+
soyo dragon plus!
2x 256 corsair ddr ram
asus geforce3 ti200 deluxe
soundblaster live! 5.1
silicon image ide-raid pci controller card
adaptec 39160 scsi card
maxtor usb 2.0 4 port pci card
pioneer 303s scsi dvd drive
pioneer 104 atapi dvd-r drive
lite-on 48x atapi cdrw drive
western digital 18160 ultra lvd scsi 18gig 8meg 10k rpm hd (boot drive)
3x western digital 120gig 8meg 7200 rpm hd
western digital 80gig 2meg 7200 rpm hd
ibm 46gig 7200 rpm hd

ok, the problem is, every few minutes the system will freeze totally, and my i mean TOTALLY. forcing me to push the result button. i have a small idea where it may be coming from, but not for certain. it may have something to do with the scsi card but i dunno why. any ideas? even typing this message i have to do fast just in case it crashes on me...

update: ok, switched a few things around now, so everything SEEMS to be working somewhat. right now my soundblaster and ethernet port are using the same irq though, which crashes windows 2000 upon startup, duting the 'setting up network connections' portion before the login. windows 2000 won't let me manually change the irq's though of either my soundcard or my ethernet. any way to do it?

[khp]

Getting rid of shared irq's on a system as loaded as yours will always be a problem.

Try freeing up some irq's be disabling any unused ports, serial, paralelle, usb.

And try messing with the PNP settings in the bios, and/or change the pci card positions.

[phamilton]

Swapping pci boards is the best way to shift IRQs on this system, but you need to be sure you don't put a board that uses bus-master mode in a slot that does not permit this mode if your motherboard has some of each.

Another option to consider is to move to WinXP which does a better job of managing several devices on the one IRQ.

BTW an obvious thing is to check that the boards are properly seated, particularly RAM. All the prodding etc involved in swapping boards can fix or half-fix this kind of problem.

And be suspicious of your Nvidia card - be sure the video driver is up-to-date, and consider downloading the generic driver from Nvidia to test the system with this in place of the Asus one (you may lose control of special setup features if Asus added any but the driver will work and provide a check on the Asus code).

[omol]

Originally posted by takeru
heres the layout of my system:

soyo dragon plus!


This is probably the problem. Or.....



soundblaster live! 5.1


SB Live + ACPI + VIA chipset means trouble. Try without SB Live to see if the problem persist.


pioneer 303s scsi dvd drive


Don't feed it with CD-R/RW disc, it will die horribly as I lost mine due to excessive read of CD-R/RW discs....:(


Also, as I see you have a lot of cards and drives connected, do you have a strong enough power supply? Even if you have a very good power supply, some board just doesn't cut. E.g. my previous Epox KT266A board with Ti4200 and another 5 PCI cards always has some random hard lock. No blue screen/kernel panic, just lock. It doesn't exhibit this odd behavour when using a GF2MX400 card. Now the ABit nForce board with the wonderful 12V P4 connector runs smooth and solid. No more random lock....:)

regards,
omol

[takeru]

yeah, i like my 303s since its the one before they started putting the region code on it, so its region free. i have a enermax 431watt psu, so i have plenty of juice going through everything. i actually thought about getting the nforce board too when i was deciding between that and this soyo board. maybe i will get the nforce2 board, WITHOUT the onboard video of course. :)

[omol]

Originally posted by takeru
yeah, i like my 303s since its the one before they started putting the region code on it, so its region free. i have a enermax 431watt psu, so i have plenty of juice going through everything. i actually thought about getting the nforce board too when i was deciding between that and this soyo board. maybe i will get the nforce2 board, WITHOUT the onboard video of course. :)

Well, the problem I was talking about is not the PSU, but rather, the motherboard. I had this 460W P4 PSU to feed the Epox board (8KHA+) with stable 5V rail but it just hard lock randomly ever since I put in the Ti4200. Everybody raves about this board as overclocker's dream board and claim it's stable. Well, yes, but it's not anymore ever since some power hungry PCI/AGP cards arrives. Replacing the board with ABit which AFAIK the only UP Socket A board with a P4 12Volt connector, the problem never appears again. But this board does have some minor glitches as I've said before in this forum. Also, if you intend to use the board, or any nForce board, as Linux workstation with non-nvidia VGA card, you will be disappointed since there is NO nForce agpgart driver.

regards,
omol