Abit AI7....

[skiddz]

Bought an Abit AI7 early last year and built up a new machine for myself. A couple months ago it started locking up and would throw the occasional BSOD. I figured with all the installing/uninstalling of crap I do, the registry was baked so I backed up all the good porn.. er.. I mean my documents <grin> and formatted the drive and started over.

Took a few evenings to get it all put back together and re-import all my mail from the archive files and all was peachy for about a month when it started acting up again. Now it's tossing 2 BSODs.. PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON-PAGED-AREA with FTDISK.SYS being the alledged cluprit and a stop code of 0x00000050 and a generic "Your machine has crashed so we've locked it up hard and will make you power it off to get it to come back up."

The FTDISK.SYS error points to a problem with my swapfile so I removed it, rebooted and replaced it on a different physical drive. Didn't do a thing. Found another article that mentioned the 0x00000050 stop code had to do with physical memory issues so I grabbed the latest memtest and let 'er rip. Errors all over the place in tests 3,4 and 5 and it's almost always the same bit position in the bad data.

I've only ever used Crucial memory and this machine has 2x512M stick of their Ballistix RAM - I've *NEVER* had a RAM issue with anything I've purchased from Crucial in the 10+ years I've been building my own machines.

I'm leaning towards the bad caps, but haven't seen a single reference here to bad AI7 boards. Would bad caps on this board make the memory "hiccup" like it is? Bad memory would explain the page fault errors as well. Unfortunately I don't have another board I can stuff this RAM into to verify the memtest results.

Funny, but I can play Halo on the thing for hours and it won't crash. If I let it sit for 20 minutes or so, it'll BSOD..

Any know of a kit for this board so I don't have to pull the thing out of my rack and poke around with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to find the values??

Thx!

[willawake]

Re: Abit AI7....

I've *NEVER* had a RAM issue with anything I've purchased from Crucial in the 10+ years I've been building my own machines.

its not a good assumption, even the best company can have some units of production bad. I am not ruling out a badcap issue but at the moment i am leaning towards bad ram. can you test each stick seperately to determine whether you have only one bad stick (which would be likely).

Would bad caps on this board make the memory "hiccup" like it is?

yeh but more likely to see random errors i would have thought.

Any know of a kit for this board so I don't have to pull the thing out of my rack and poke around with a flashlight and a magnifying glass to find the values??

you would anyway have to pull the board and take it out of the case to check the cap brands and values. some abit boards used japanese caps only, others of the same model did not. it would be good to check anyway even if you find you have one bad stick, so you know whether the board is something to worry about or not.

[Fatal0E]

Re: Abit AI7....

I've seen my fair share of defective crucial ram. Its nice highly compatible stuff but it does fail sometimes.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Abit AI7....

Had a Twinmos 512MB module die on me... One error in the 14MB range...

Would love to be able to hide that bad address and continue using the RAM cause I messed up the RMA and now I can't get it replaced

It exists for Linux but for Windows there is nothing similar, it could work to do it from BIOS, you know the setting "Memory hole 15-16m" just modify the BIOS so it shadows a different range... But alas this mobo does not have ISA slots so it does not have that option so I have no idea where to begin...

Sorry for hijacking your thread skiddz

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

OK, now this is wierd.. After I posted my initial message, I went to the garage to work on my ATV for a bit (Replacing the clutch if anyone cares. heheh) and then came back in to the office to see how memtest was going. For giggles, I restarted the tests and sat there for a minute watching the results. Not a single error as it completed test 4. I left it alone to finish up my work in the garage and when I came back in around 12:30am, it had finished the 1st round of tests and was starting test 2. STILL no errors... WTF??

I hate to just shotgun parts in trying to figure out what's really wrong but I think I'll go ahead and recap the board since it won't cost me more than $30 and some time. Hopefully that'll fix it (because I'm getting tired of booting my kids of their computer so I can get my stuff done)

[dood]

Re: Abit AI7....

Did you actually visually inspect the caps yet?

[Rainbow]

Re: Abit AI7....

And check them not only on the board but in the PSU too.

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

yeah, took a look at the caps on the board. Didn't see any obvious bad ones and it looks like about half of them are Rubycons (Well, they're purple like the Rubys) but I can't see for sure unless I pull the board out. Funny, but it's been running fine thus far today.

I did swap the PSU a couple weeks ago but the problems persisted so I put the original back.

Now I'm wondering if perhaps my system drive (WD ATA133 40G 7200 rpm) is the problem. With the page fault errors it's something between the memory and the drive. Frustrating..

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

OK, figured it out. Almost every cap on the AI7 is Rubycon so I'm satisfied it's not the mobo. Memory tests fine on another machine I borrowed for the weekend and swapping video cards still showed the problem. Only thing left was the HD. It's a Western Digital WD400BB 40 gigger and WD's diag software showed it as failing the S.M.A.R.T test. I backed everything up and let the WD software do what it wanted to do to the drive and it failed every test thrown at it. Picked up an 80g SATA drive and bolted it in. Running perfectly now, even at tasks where I could get it to BSOD almost at will.

Not sure what happened, but the old drive was barely a year old.. Only my 2nd HD failure since 1987... Not a bad record.

[willawake]

Re: Abit AI7....

thats curious.......getting memory errors with bad hdd, are you running memtest in windows?

the WD diagnostics are honest, good job you replaced the drive. I am suprised you did not notice any abnormal sounds from the drive up to this point though.

Glad you found the solution.

[dood]

Re: Abit AI7....

That HD should still be under warranty...

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

thats curious.......getting memory errors with bad hdd, are you running memtest in windows?

the WD diagnostics are honest, good job you replaced the drive. I am suprised you did not notice any abnormal sounds from the drive up to this point though.

Glad you found the solution.

No, I ran memtest right off the floppy. Haven't had any errors since the 1st time through on this AI7 or the borrowed MSI board I ran over the last weekend.

Drive never made a sound and a surface scan shows no bad sectors at all. WD tech support thinks the controller board on the drive took a dump. Not sure if the drive is still under warranty or not. Gotta dig up the receipt for it and find out.

I've got a couple days on the new drive without a crash and was able to burn a bunch of video to DVD last night without a hiccup so I'm sure the problem is solved.

Now if I could only figure out why this POS Dell my bro-in law gave me keeps locking up... (Future kids computer)

[dood]

Re: Abit AI7....

no need to dig up a receipt. Just go to Western Digitals website and get into their warranty services section... They have a spot where you enter the drives serial number and it tells you if you're still under warranty.

Here - http://websupport.wdc.com/warranty/s...rranty&lang=en

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

Oh cool.. I'll do that tonight.. Thanks!

[MD Willington]

Re: Abit AI7....

POS Dell

GX270 ??


MD

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

GX270 ??


MD

Nope. Dimension 4100. Locks up after about an hour of use - gotta be hardware because it's only got a fresh install of Win2k server on it.


BTW: For anyone interested, the WD drive shows up as "Limited Warrany Not Available". Must've been an OEM (i.e non-boxed) drive.

[willawake]

Re: Abit AI7....

the WD drive shows up as "Limited Warrany Not Available". Must've been an OEM (i.e non-boxed) drive.

OEM drives have warranty. I have never purchased boxed drives. I deal with my supplier though for warranty rather than direct with WD.

[skiddz]

Re: Abit AI7....

Well crap.. The BSODs are back.. Different stop code now tho.. 0x0000008E. Seems to be something with the Nvidia DLLs, but got one this morning referencing the page fault again..

WTF? It ran for a couple weeks with no problems and now it's acting up again..

memtest still shows no errors even after letting it run overnight, the WD diags say both drives are good but here's a nifty twist. The brand new 80G drive is showing 80k of bad sectors in the same exact spot as the failed 40G drive.

BIOS hiccups?? Didn't have time to reflash it before work so will give that a go when I get home.

Even though this MB has mostly Rubies on it, I think I'm gonna recap it anyways just to remove the board from the list of possible guilty components.

Grrrr..

[gg1978]

Re: Abit AI7....

Oddly enough, we've got a Averatec 3150 laptop at work that has been exhibiting the same types of errors ( stop 50 and 8E). The thing with the laptop though, is that sometimes only half the added SODIMM is recognized. So instead of POSTing with 640M of RAM, it POST's with 384. I did an advanced RMA on the ram through Kingston, and received it today, so we'll see if the new DIMM fixes the issue or not.

The funny thing about the laptop was that Memtest86 worked perfectly overnight, as well as prime95.. I was just looking at it one time and then i remembered that it has 128M soldered down, as well as one SODIMM slot, which has a 512M module. That's how i figured the SODIMM has a quirky fault that makes only half of it work sometimes.


If you have a couple of other sticks of RAM to try, or just try one stick at a time. Maybe try bumping Vmem +.1V or so..

[Per Hansson]

Re: Abit AI7....

Send me the minidump file from the crash saved in %windir%\Minidump

Sometimes WinDBG can be quite useful in diagnosing this stuff...