variation on CTD - Crash to reboot!

[johnm]

I've recently built a new machine - ECS GeForce 6100PM-M2, Athlon 64 X2 5200+, 2gb memory and nvidia 8600 with 1gb. Only because my old machine struggled with SH3/GWX.

After installing XP I had problems with sound drivers and eventually gave up and bought a USB sound thingy.

When running SH3/GW2.1 it loads fast, runs fine but whenever I close the program it displays a blue screen full of information for about 2 seconds then reboots the machine!

A few days ago it did the same trick but when the machine came back up again. it announced that the partition was unusable.

I am now unable to boot the machine into xp and it looks like I will have to completely re-install XP, SH3 & GW2.1. Naturally I'm not happy.

My problem is this -- do you think the problem is in SH3 or the hardware?

Sorry I can't give details of mods etc but I can't get into the machine at all.

[nikbear]

you could try,start the computer,put your windows xp disc in drive then restart the computer and start pressing f8 continusly,and you should be given the option to boot straight from the disc,press enter.this should take you to the winXP instilation screen,where there is an option to repair windows,usually by pressing R then follow instructions....if that doesn't work then it could be a full reinstall,best of luck. If it does work, the pc will reboot and you should be able to log into windows. Providing you can do this, restart in safe mode and remove the game completely and reinstall it.. then reboot in normal mode, hope this is of some help.

[johnm]

Thanks, just returned from holiday. Will try and report. Over and out!

[badwolf]

Is the harddrive new, the partition message would make me re-partition, format and a complete re-installation. If that failed I'd get a new drive. I'd also put windows in its own partition, makes maintanance far easier.

[johnno74]

It sounds like a driver problem, or perhaps hardware. Its definitely not a SH3 problem, a bluescreen indicates a crash in a hardware driver, or the OS itself. The fact that this is reproduceable indicates its more likely drivers.

Unfortunately you've had the bad luck to get a bluescreen in the middle of something writing to your HD, and as a result something important got corrupted. This is extremely unusual.... Is your HD formatted as NTFS or FAT? NTFS is far, far more resistant to this sort of corruption.

If you get it going a good first step in diagnosing this is to go into my computer properties, startup and recovery, and untick the "automatically reboot" option under "system failure."

Then next time it happens, write down the stop error code (2 digit hex number) and the first number after this (6 or 8 digits)
you'll see something like "STOP 0x7c (0x00000123......."
its the first two sets of numbers that tell you the most. If it is a driver crash you often get the name of the driver somewhere down the bottom of the screen - look for a filename ending in .sys

Let us know how you go...

[maddysad]

Hi
IMHO but I'm no expert :-?
Your problem is probably Graphics card related
Blue screen reads Nv 4 (I think)
I have NV8600GS 512 and have 3GB memory XP and occassionally receive Blue Screen of Death when loading IL2 1946 which should require less effort from my card.SH3 runs great with everthing full on (just slows down in heated battles)
I have tried various drivers to no avail :down:
Try reducing some of your settings a little AA, resolution, etc etc

Also consider Overheating as My purchase of a massive fan in a larger case helped immensely

Afraid I settle for "I need BETTER Graphic Card but can live with what I have at the moment"

Good luck

maddysad

[johnm]

Thanks for the replies, I've just returned from a short break and haven't had time to play.

To summarise my replies:

To badwolf:

My Hard Drive is new, in fact it was found faulty and replaced. This is using the new drive.

My partitioning gives XP a 12 gb partition with two other partitions. SH3 gets about 36gb because I try to run several versions: eg: vanilla, vanilla with uberboot, GW2.1, GW2.1 with S-boot.

Also flightgear.

maddysad: My graphics card is not first rate but pretty good : nvidia 8600 with 1gb.


I will attempt to repair my XP system following nikbear's advice and if it works, I'll try to untick the "automatically reboot" option under "system failure." as per Johno74 and then see what happens. I will report asap.

[johnm]

Started to check out the problem.

Put XP disc in drive and rebooted, came up perfectly! However at no time did any booting information appear. First visible screen was the XP screen followed by the desktop. Only problem was screen came up with 1024x768 rather than my selected format of 1600x1200 but this was happening before.

I changed the screen size, changed the 'my computer' setting to not reboot on failure which required a restart. I restarted the machine to find it stayed blank! Put in a livecd, disc lights flashed as it was (apparently) read but no screen appears. Tried holding 'del' while booting but no bios screen.

Re-inserted the XP disc, reboot, lights flash and up comes XP straight into my desktop!

What on earth??? Seems the only way I can boot it up is with the XP disc. I would assume it is actually getting the XP from the disc but it is using the harddrive version of desktop so I assume its booted up the C drive O/S.

If the xp disc gets booted it should, logically, boot up a linux live cd(especially one it has run before all this problem happened.

Leaves me up a creek with out a paddle!

Can't even use a cd to wipe the hard drive and start afresh. Mind you, I don't want to do that yet, even if I could. It's a lot of work to wipe, reinstall XP, then SH3 then GW2 etc.

:down: :cry: :-?


p.s. I'm lucky at present that I have more than one machine in use, so I can talk to you on one while the flash new beasty is being beastly.