Random Crashes

[ApolloX]

Yes although there haven't been 'new' nvidia drivers for AMD NF4 in 9 months.

[jo blo]

So I finally dropped the RAID array (breaking it in the F10 RAID setup, writing 0's to drives) and installed Windows onto one of the drives. My problems returned within 2 days, before I had installed hardly any software, and before I had installed Nvidia IDE drivers (I then installed the Nvidia IDE drivers, and the problem remained unchanged). I'm now getting copious disk errors in event viewer. I doubt the underlying errors are different than before. I didn't see anything showing up in the event viewer I'm guessing because they were masked by the RAID controller and not communicated to the OS. Thing is, both before and now, WD diagnostics (DOS based) do not uncover any drive errors even with the extensive, 1 hour test on either drive. Nonetheless, It looks like I'm dealing with a failing mainboard or drive, not drivers, PSU, RAM, and most likely not CPU. I'll be starting my own thread on this.

 

This is my first build, and I'm starting to appreciate that the price of entry for building your own system is having duplicate parts on hand, or buying them as needed, in order to solve problems by process of elimination with known good parts. I've been dealing with this issue for many months, the frustration and lost time has been a classy lady, and in retrospect I should have started buying new stuff after a week or two, not a month or two in between each. Or I need to befriend some gamers. ApolloX, good luck with your gear, you might consider dropping $50 on a cheap card to see if it's the hardware that's the problem, or borrow one if you can.

[Sharp]

Hello,

 

NTLDR would mean for some reason the hard drive with windows stopped working.

 

Just after a crash sometimes the hard drive will need a bit of time to power up, you may be able to here it spinning up. Should your drive not have had enough time to nower up it may have caused the NTLDR error.

 

Or for some reason your it lost power, maybe a faulty PSU or you have to many things powered from the same rail?

 

Do you have another GFX card to try or can you test it in another pc?

[foxX]

very similar problems (except for the blackness of the windows screen followed by the lack of bsod and just windows continuing normally) happened to my friend's computer (ati, intel-based).

 

memtest/windows memory diagnostic ran fine

dual prime95 also fine

scandisk ran fine too

voltages looked ok with a fluke oscilloscope

several windows reinstalls with different drivers finished giving same symptomes

 

after nearly a month, the hard disk drive failed (seagate sata). with a new hard disk, it all went ok; even now her system is rock stable.