I just built a brand new system which is meant for a friend of mine and I've run into a problem that I've never encountered before and I hope that someone can give me an idea or two on what the problem could be.
First this system uses these parts: Antec 300 case, Maximus III Gene motherboard, Intel i7-870 Cpu, Patriot 8GB PC3-12800 memory kit, OCZ Stealth X Stream 700Watt PSU, XFX GeForce 210 graphics card, Sony 22X DVD drive, Western Digital 1TB Black Edition hard Drive.
Before attempting installation of the operating system I checked and this board already had the latest Bios available. While this board has numerous overclocking features, at the moment everything is running at the defaults, except the memory timings which I manually changed to the manufacturers specs of 9-9-9-24.
When I put this system together, I attached the hard drive to the JMicron controller as my experience is that its superior to the Intel SATA controller, then I attached the DVD drive to the Intel controller. (I have a system of my own similar to this using the Maximus III Formula, the same Patriot memory and an I7-875K cpu and no problems at all)
The most bizarre aspect of this problem is that I initially installed Windows 7 Pro x64 and had no problem. I installed the latest chipset driver from Intel, the latest JMicron drivers from their website, the latest Lan; audio; PC Probe from Asus; downloaded and installed the latest Windows updates. Everything was working fine and then for no reason that I can determine the system rebooted itself (not after any particular install or update) and at that point windows simply would not start saying that the system restarted unexpectedly. All my attempts at startup repair failed, I was able to start the system in safe mode with networking but nothing that I was able to do changed the fact that the system would not start normally.
The first thing that I tried was to run Memtest86 4.10 and it made four successful passes with no errors so I don't believe that this is a memory error. Then I checked the PSU with an Antec digital power supply tester, a couple of the voltages were slightly off for example one 12volt reported 11.9 and one 5volt reported 5.1 but the tester seemed to indicate that this was within acceptable parameters.
I tried switching the hard drive from the JMicron controller to the Intel controller and tried reinstalling Windows, i.e. deleting the existing partitions and starting from scratch but this time the install was not able to finish. Part way through the install I got the message "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed". For some reason the Western Digital Diagnostics for Dos will not run on this system so I removed the hard drive and attached it to one of my computers and I'm in the process of running the WD Diags for windows extended drive test, which on a drive this size is going to take 2 or 3 hours but so it passed the SMART test and no errors have been detected.
I haven't really considered that the video card may be bad, only because the video appears to be working correctly with no problems.
I'm running out of idea's here, does anyone have some insight into what could be the issue?
Thanks,
- Norm
First this system uses these parts: Antec 300 case, Maximus III Gene motherboard, Intel i7-870 Cpu, Patriot 8GB PC3-12800 memory kit, OCZ Stealth X Stream 700Watt PSU, XFX GeForce 210 graphics card, Sony 22X DVD drive, Western Digital 1TB Black Edition hard Drive.
Before attempting installation of the operating system I checked and this board already had the latest Bios available. While this board has numerous overclocking features, at the moment everything is running at the defaults, except the memory timings which I manually changed to the manufacturers specs of 9-9-9-24.
When I put this system together, I attached the hard drive to the JMicron controller as my experience is that its superior to the Intel SATA controller, then I attached the DVD drive to the Intel controller. (I have a system of my own similar to this using the Maximus III Formula, the same Patriot memory and an I7-875K cpu and no problems at all)
The most bizarre aspect of this problem is that I initially installed Windows 7 Pro x64 and had no problem. I installed the latest chipset driver from Intel, the latest JMicron drivers from their website, the latest Lan; audio; PC Probe from Asus; downloaded and installed the latest Windows updates. Everything was working fine and then for no reason that I can determine the system rebooted itself (not after any particular install or update) and at that point windows simply would not start saying that the system restarted unexpectedly. All my attempts at startup repair failed, I was able to start the system in safe mode with networking but nothing that I was able to do changed the fact that the system would not start normally.
The first thing that I tried was to run Memtest86 4.10 and it made four successful passes with no errors so I don't believe that this is a memory error. Then I checked the PSU with an Antec digital power supply tester, a couple of the voltages were slightly off for example one 12volt reported 11.9 and one 5volt reported 5.1 but the tester seemed to indicate that this was within acceptable parameters.
I tried switching the hard drive from the JMicron controller to the Intel controller and tried reinstalling Windows, i.e. deleting the existing partitions and starting from scratch but this time the install was not able to finish. Part way through the install I got the message "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed". For some reason the Western Digital Diagnostics for Dos will not run on this system so I removed the hard drive and attached it to one of my computers and I'm in the process of running the WD Diags for windows extended drive test, which on a drive this size is going to take 2 or 3 hours but so it passed the SMART test and no errors have been detected.
I haven't really considered that the video card may be bad, only because the video appears to be working correctly with no problems.
I'm running out of idea's here, does anyone have some insight into what could be the issue?
Thanks,
- Norm
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