Severe Hardware Issues

[Quantum Ninja]

I've been having some computer issues for the past few days that I've yet to resolve. Here's my system specs:

Asus A7N8X 2.0 Mobo
AMD Athlon 2500+
1 GB Ram
Radeon 9500 Pro
SB Audigy
Windows XP Home

Here's a rundown on the story. My computer's been running pretty much fine since I built it this past December with relatively no problems. About two months ago, I was having some minor issues with my onboard sound, which included "static hissing" through my speakers when no sound was being played, and sound cutting out during gameplay. So at the beginning of this month, I swapped out my SB Audigy from my older PC, disabled the onboad sound, and everything was peachy.

Thursday night, I decided to finally set up my MIDI box (personal hobby of mine) since I hadn't set it up since I've returned from school. At school, I never had any problems with it, but that was using the onboard sound. The only thing that's changed since then is the SB Audigy. So I go to set up the MIDI box, which connects via Com port. When I reboot, Windows XP halts at the loading screen; the little green bar stops moving and all hard drive activity stops. So I did the only thing I was forced to do at this point: restart. Same deal. Then I unplug the MIDI box, Windows seemingly loads up fine, and I reach the login screen. System automatically reboots, every time.

Then I turn off the automatic reboot on system failure option to find out the cause of the problem, and I get a blue screen indicating a physical memory dump with the following information:

STOP: 0x0000008E (0xC0000005, 0xBF9EA370, 0xBA5F9E00, 0x00000000)
ati2dvag.dll - Address BF9EA370 base at BF9BB000, DateStamp 3da8d714

Before I saw this blue screen, I thought the problem might be related to the serial port or my sound card. Now, because of the ati2dvag.dll error, I think the source of the problem is my video card. I've tried most things I can think of: virus scan, disabling the COM port, removing the sound card, installing new video drivers (I run into an error whenever I try this), and a few other things I can't remember at this point. Any thoughts on what the problem is, and how I might go about fixing it? Do I have an IRQ conflict, corrupted driver file, or what?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Terry Penrod]

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I'm still very new to Win XP but have you tried doing a simple system restore to a point prior to making this change? That might reset things back the way they were so you can at least try something else.

Cheers, Terry

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[Jagndeke]

Easiest thing to try is uninstall the vid card driver and reboot. If the problem is gone, then you know you found it. Just reinstall whichever version of vid driver you want for your card.

[Quantum Ninja]

I forget to mention that I already tried a system restore, going back two days before the problem occurred, and this turned out unsuccessful. It may have something to do with the fact that the system restarted before it could finish doing the mandatory reboot after the restore.

And I have tried uninstalling my video drivers, but I keep running into a message stating that the system failed to remove the driver because "the device may be required to boot up the computer."

BTW, I can get into safe mode with no problems, which is where I've been carrying out all of my attempts.

[Gaim Mastr]

So it was your audio card & onboard chip that were giving you problems. But now you're getting operating system problems from your video card driver (ati2dvag.dll) ??

Have you tried the obvious...

Remove the audio and vidieo cards and see if you can boot your system as normal.

If so, try to uninstall the drivers for both cards.

Download & install the latest BIOS for your motherboard.

See if there is a driver update for your onboard audio chip.

Install the latest video & sound card drivers.

[Jagndeke]

A couple of things for you...

Try reading this thread. (http://www.driverforum.com/graphics5/10101.html) It seems to be somewhat related to the issue you are having. Although I would be wary of DL'ing an ATI update from MS. But reading the thread and responses might point you in a direction you haven't tried yet.

Also, try using the latest Omega drivers. (http://www.omegacorner.com/) But... don't try to uninstall your current drivers. Just install the Omega's overtop of your current drivers. Omega drivers worked out a bug with ATI drivers that I had. The bug drove me absolutely :crazy: for a month but Omega's drivers fixed it. And ATI drivers aren't as sensitive to being overwritten as NVidia drivers are.

[RangerRick]

This sounds very similar to a problem I had more than a year ago.

My system was running fine, and I had made no hardware or software changes. I may have had some minor problems as you did prior automatic reboot at when you get to the logon screen. I tried booting up in safe mode to no avail. I could not do a prior restore either.
I called MS support to help with the problem, but they could not resolve the problem.

I wound up reformatting the drive to clean it completely, and reloaded everything. It took me several days to get everything loaded back up, but since I did that, everything has been fine(knock on wood!).
If I recall correctly, I was able to boot to dos and look at the files on the drive, and therfore able to copy anything I wanted to save first.
I keep my games on a seperate drive, so all my saved games were ok. I only had to reinstall the games, and was good to go.

I hope you are able to resolve the problem without resorting to a complete rebuild.

Good luck!

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

Although I would be wary of DL'ing an ATI update from MS.

Why? It's ATI's driver.

Here's a little bit of information for you guys; Microsoft doesn't write hardware specific drivers (I.e. video card drivers). You may download them from Microsoft but ATI writes and maintains them. They submit them to WHQL for signing (meaning they've passed a series of tests), once they're signed, they go up to Windows Update. Any problems in that driver go back to ATI for fixing.


Quantum Ninja;

What are you plugging your MIDI device in to? The SB Audigy? It's possible that when the MIDI device went in, it killed the IRQ controller on the motherboard. Which is why you weren't able to boot the system to begin with. I'd be interested in seeing (highly unlikely the information is available) the dump files for when it would crash on boot. It's also likely that when it gagged the IRQ table, it tromped the table for the Video Card's resources and voila, smoked system.

FYI:

The KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED bug check has a value of 0x0000008E. This indicates that a kernel-mode program generated an exception which the error handler did not catch.

AND btw, you can get away from full restoration of your system by just doing an inplace install. It preserves the user environment (i.e favorites, settings and such) while re-writing the kernel and system files.

[Jagndeke]

Why? It's ATI's driver.

Here's a little bit of information for you guys; Microsoft doesn't write hardware specific drivers (I.e. video card drivers). You may download them from Microsoft but ATI writes and maintains them. They submit them to WHQL for signing (meaning they've passed a series of tests), once they're signed, they go up to Windows Update. Any problems in that driver go back to ATI for fixing.

My mother-in-law messed up her system by installing a vid card update off of MS's auto update site. Chances are that her own ineptitude around technology contributed significantly to the mess as well.

But personnally I'd rather get my vid and sound card updates from the manufacturer's site, uninstall the original properly and then install the new update. I could be wrong, but I don't think the auto updated feature at MS does an uninstall of the driver first before it installs the new one.

[Quantum Ninja]

Quantum Ninja;

What are you plugging your MIDI device in to? The SB Audigy?


The MIDI device connects to my computer in two places: serial port on the mobo and audio input jack on the SB Audigy.


It's possible that when the MIDI device went in, it killed the IRQ controller on the motherboard. Which is why you weren't able to boot the system to begin with. I'd be interested in seeing (highly unlikely the information is available) the dump files for when it would crash on boot. It's also likely that when it gagged the IRQ table, it tromped the table for the Video Card's resources and voila, smoked system.


Is there any way I can verify if the IRQ controller is toasted for certain? Also, if the dump files are available, where/how do I access them?

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

Is there any way I can verify if the IRQ controller is toasted for certain? Also, if the dump files are available, where/how do I access them?


The IRQ controller is really a software thing. You can get into System Information application (Start >> Run >> Accessroies >> System Tools) and look at the Hardware Resources section. Under there is section "IRQs", there's a status field to the right of each device.

You can also look at the "Conflicts and Sharing" secition to see if any conflicts show up. But don't infer that every device showing up here is a conflicted device. Some devices do share IRQs & resources.

You'll find your dump files;

%systemroot%\memory.dmp (where %systemroot% is the windows installation folder, i.e. c:\windows)



But personnally I'd rather get my vid and sound card updates from the manufacturer's site, uninstall the original properly and then install the new update. I could be wrong, but I don't think the auto updated feature at MS does an uninstall of the driver first before it installs the new one.


Nope, you'd be right. The only difference with drivers between the two sources is the version. Normally ATI, Creative, nVidia, et.al dump non WHQL certified drivers up on their sites, the ones on Windows Update tend to be a version or two behind them because of the WHQL certification.

[Quantum Ninja]

The IRQ controller is really a software thing. You can get into System Information application (Start >> Run >> Accessroies >> System Tools) and look at the Hardware Resources section. Under there is section "IRQs", there's a status field to the right of each device.

Ok. I had already looked at that section before. The Status of all my IRQ lines is "OK". This is in safe mode, though. Would there be any difference between the status of the IRQ lines in safe mode versus normal mode if there really was an IRQ related problem?


You can also look at the "Conflicts and Sharing" secition to see if any conflicts show up. But don't infer that every device showing up here is a conflicted device. Some devices do share IRQs & resources.


The only IRQ conflict/shares listed in this section now (I think I remember there being more last time I checked, but I've also disabled a few devices since then...) are:

IRQ 3 OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
IRQ 3 RADEON 9500 PRO / 9700

IRQ 22 Standard OpenHCD USB Host Controller
IRQ 22 NVIDIA nForce MCP Networking Adapter

Does it seem typical for a 1394 controller to share an IRQ with the video card? Or is this more likely a conflict? If anything, this might seem like a potential source for the problem, because the 1394 FireWire is integrated to the sound card, and like I said before, the sound card is the only thing that's changed since I last used my MIDI device (besides a BIOS update, I believe).

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

It's okay for them to share an IRQ. You might also check the memory section to see if the card is sharing any address ranges w/ another device.

What you might do at this point is pull the sound card out of the system, uninstall all the software w/ it. Boot to safe mode, uninstall the video card from the device manager. Reboot the system and let the OS go into "normal" mode. It will install the video card, drivers, then reboot the sytem. Then reinstall the sound card.

BIOS updates reset your BIOS values, so any values you had set in the BIOS were wiped. You might want to walk your way through and check those values again.

[Quantum Ninja]

Well, I'm not going to celebrate too prematurely, but I think, THINK, my system is back to normal. I removed my sound card, uninstalled the drivers, disabled my video card in the device manager, uninstalled video drivers (albeit, uncleanly because it gave some error messages), reinstalled the video drivers, re-enabled the video card, then re-installed the sound card. Not sure doing anything to the sound card was necessary, but hey, it didn't hurt, right?

I'll be on the alert for the next few days, prepared for any more system errors because I'm not entirely convinced that the problem won't return. I'm definitely hesitant about connecting my MIDI device now. At least I can go back to my normal PC activities.

Thanks for all the help, guys! I appreciate it. It's been hard living the past few days with a defunct PC. :):

[0x64657200 0x6A61636B616C00]

The MIDI box is accessed through a COM Port, but it has to map to the sound card for optional audio output. So, it never hurts to make sure you have all the resources which are going to be using the MIDI box situated.

The key to all of this is; it started after you plugged in a new device. So, you take all the devices involved, sit them down in a room and make them play nice with one another. :)