Quake3World

I've had a major problem recently develop with my gaming machine.

Specs are:

AMD Athlon 64 3200+
1 Gig pc2700 ram
Geforce 6800gt 256mb
SATA 250 gig

I'll start from the beginning. A few days ago I unhooked my gaming machine (unhooked the mouse/kb power cord and network cable) so I could hook up and fix someone elses computer. After fixing theirs I hooked mine back up and I started getting losing network connectivity when downloading and transferring files. Soon after I started getting blue screens like this:



and another one referencing rdbss.sys. After a bit this message started showing up:



After one boot my soundcard was no longer detected. I tried reinstalling drivers for both my onboard nic and soundcard but neither seemed to help the issue.

So I let chkdsk run and it says it fixed a few corrupt files and then when windows tries to boot I get the above stop error.

I ran the Western Digital Diagnostic Tool and did a quick scan and an extended scan on the drive and results had zero errors.

I've used the Recovery Console and tried the fixmbr and fixboot but neither have stopped the bluscreens. I've been able to get the pc to boot fully from time to time but it shortly bluescreens to the stop message.

I've unhooked everything and made sure it was dust free and used my power supply tester and there wasn't anything too out of the ordinary except for the 3.5v fluctuating a little bit over the +% range. I then hooked it back up and the same thing still happened. I can boot to any program off a cd without any problem for any length of time.

I tried using the sfc /scanonce command from the command line but it tells me that the RPC is unavailable. I looked up for a fix on it and all they say is to make sure the RPC service is set to automatic and that a certain verisign certificate is in place which both already are.

So yeah, I'm stumped on this. I've done a ton of googling on this and feel like I haven't really made any progress. I suppose the only thing to do is cut my loss and reformat.

If you've checked over all possible loose connections then yeah, reformat.

If that doesn't work, swap out the hard drive and try again.

If it really was connected to the time you unplugged it (and you could be connecting things in error there) then it's either:
- Loose connection
- Disk damage
- Component damage
- Power damage

You've ruled out a chunk of those so work on the remainder.

Sucks though man

Thanks for the response Foo. I always seem to get the really extreme problems when it comes to pcs.

So I hooked up a spare IDE hard drive I had and unhooked all my current drives. Began installing xp and after the initial install it rebooted and then it booted to the windows installation/configuration screen where it finishes installing components. It went for about a minute and them bam:



I also tried booting off an older knoppix cd and it ended up hard locking about a minute after it was done loading everything. I ran memtest for a couple hours and it didn't return any errors either.

So that pretty much rules out any hdds or hdd cables and ram that I was using. So I think it's pretty much narrowed down to the mobo or possibly the cpu. Now whether or not it was a result of the psu or not or power damage is something I'm not sure how to determine.

Would perhaps running a cpu stress/burn-in program be able to tell me if the cpu is the problem?

Download Prime95, it can stress the Cpu/NB/Ram and see if it can casue a hickup.

Also, Memtest should be run for >4 hours.
Things like Prime95 and etc should be run for >4 hours as well..

Yea, listen to amidy.

Do you have it plugged into a decent surge protector? Ever had power issues in your house before?

I'd run that program if I didn't have to be in Windows. The system just isn't stable enough to run it without bluescreening after a few seconds.

Yea, I do have it hooked up to a surge protector. I think the mobo is at fault. I'm trying at least one more thing before I try ordering a replacement.

I'm going with the mb as well.

I appreciate the help guys. I'm pretty much without a doubt that it's the mobo. After a while the pc wouldn't get past the "Checking NVRAM..." point in the bios. I even reflashed it a couple times and the problem still persisted.

Unless someone has a suggestion I've been looking at some mobos on pricwatch.

I'm thinking of getting this mobo since it had good reviews online and is compatible with all of my current hardware, spec wise anyway. Hopefully it's not picky about certain brands of ram.

http://3btech.net/ask8at64so75.html

I get nervous whenever someone mentions Asrock. From what I've heard, they're prone to break down. I have not used one myself, mind you, but I've heard nothing but negative comments about them.

obsidian wrote:I get nervous whenever someone mentions Asrock. From what I've heard, they're prone to break down. I have not used one myself, mind you, but I've heard nothing but negative comments about them.

Thanks for the advice Obsidian. I went with this board since Asus is a more reliable brand.

http://3btech.net/ask8so754maw2.html

I'll post a follow up once I receive it and get everything all hooked up.

Good news. I got the new motherboard in today and everything seems to be in working order. Although I had to reinstall windows on a new drive because the old one wouldn't boot because of the mobo change.

So how it's just a matter of backing up everything off of the old drive and then reinstalling on that drive since it's a much faster drive than the one I had to reinstall onto.

Can anyone recommend me a program to backup the fresh install I just made so I can reimage it onto the other drive? Something along the lines of Norton Ghost or Arconis Trueimage. I've never used any of them so I'm not sure what's best.

Trueimage