Is this a blown cap on my motherboard?

[pete_c]

I had a wierd issue crop up on my newer at home office desktop. I liked the old HP case and ripped the guts out putting in a new PS, MB, etc. I went to a dual core, SATA drive, dual video head card, etc (all the bells and whistles). I installed XP Pro SP3 with the SATA boot drivers on it. All appeared fine when I did the installation. I started to get unexplained reboots. It typically would happen when I would click on a link. At first I ignored it a bit because it really didn't happen that often. I always left the PC on. Then one time the boot up sequence locked. The reboot had trashed my SATA MBR so I had to do a chkdsk on it. After the second time it trashed my HD decided to have a better look as to why the error was occurring.

I narrowed it down to the NVidea drivers for the dual head video card display. A BSOD was occurring but the screen would flash so quickly it was difficult to see the error. I had never seen anything like this. I started to believe it was some sort of HW error with the NVideo card. I swapped out the card with another new dual head video card and after a week or so the error started to occur again.

I was kind of baffled consider the amount of time and money I had spent on building this new PC.

I traced the error down to a PCAnywhere video host driver. Even though I never used PCAnywhere in host mode it had loaded a DLL which worked concurrently with the dual head video display. The error only came up when I had IE open (only on the 2nd display) and would click on a link. (thought too it might have been a Java conflict maybe with an active x component at one time...). I thought too it was related to BT drivers that I was loading because I had a persistent BT keyboard mouse combo driver that wouldn't go away even after removing anything related to BT on my PC.

I removed PCAnywhere and the error went away. I never saw any docs / patches to PCAnywhere on the Symantec site explaining the error though. It was an version (circa 8.x) of PCAnywhere and I have it installed on a laptop now and its running fine with no problems.

 

[beelzerob]

Hmm. Well, the most useful step in troubleshooting is REPEATABILITY, something I don't have right now, as it's happening on WHS...so even if it's occuring directly as a result of something, it's not while I'm actually on it doing something.

I checked it this morning, and it's still running with its bare-bones XP install.

So I tried to think about what this test will prove:

1) If it *does* lock up, then I can be almost 100% certain it's hardware related, since I've removed the previous software install and the previous hard disks from the equation. That would leave essentially either the motherboard or video card. The video card is *OLD*, so I guess that would be the first thing to replace and see. Hard to believe it'd be the video card though, since...well, being a server, I really don't USE the video card! But I guess that's not going to protect against some kind of faulty connection freezing things up.

2) If it *doesn't* lock up (which who knows how long I have to let it run before I decide it hasn't), then that probably excludes the motherboard and video card from blame. That leaves the software install and hard drives. I can do a chkdsk on the disks, and if those are clean, I'll just do a reinstall from scratch. I'll bring everything up to speed version wise and then let it sit...add nothing extraneous.


I checked the bios version, and it is current. The battery appears to still have a charge, as it kept the date even being unplugged for a couple days.

Thanks for the help guys!

 

[beelzerob]

Pete, how exactly did you narrow it down to that? These rogue software issues seem the most impossible to duplicate or track down, short of just reinstalling from scratch (in which case you've still never identified the culprit).

 

[electron]

Run Prime95, it's a stress test which should crash that machine pretty quick if it there is a real issue. Video cards CAN cause these kind of problems, as can hard drives with damaged controllers.

 

[beelzerob]

ok, thanks...I'll do that tonight.

Should I plug in the other hard drives and reboot into WHS before doing this, or just run it on my bare XP install? I guess it won't hurt to run it from there first.

Do I need to install all of the hardware device drivers first? I know I don't have the video or motherboard drivers loaded yet. I realized that this bare install probably isn't utilizing the board as much or as thoroughly as the other install did, so may not be exercising everything, including faulty parts. The benchmark should take care of that!

 

[pete_c]

To get to see what the BSOD what indicating keep trying to see what the error code was like (also looked at the Dump - which to me was non descriptive hash) narrowing it down to a DLL or SYS file. I've never seen a BSOD occur so quickly. It would be a hard boot to BIOS. Then I saw it was a video related file. It had video or similiar in the spelling of the driver. Finally doing a file search and an about of properties noticed that the video sys or dll file that belonged to Symantec PCAnywhere. Just remembering that doing a detail video performance test would also cause the BSOD.

Here's a quick clip and paste for my office PC via SiSoftware Sandra. This was not a high priced DIY rather it was pretty reasonable in cost.

SiSoftware Sandra

System
Host Name : ICS-001-OFFICE
User : Pete
Workgroup : ICS

Processor
Model : Pentium® Dual-Core CPU E5300 @ 2.60GHz
Speed : 2.62GHz
Cores per Processor : 2 Unit(s)
Threads per Core : 1 Unit(s)
Type : Dual-Core
Internal Data Cache : 2x 32kB, Synchronous, Write-Thru, 8-way, 64 byte line size
L2 On-board Cache : 2MB, ECC, Synchronous, ATC, 8-way, 64 byte line size, 2 threads sharing

System
System : System manufacturer System Product Name
Mainboard : ASUSTeK Computer INC. P5KPL-CM
Bus(es) : ISA PCI PCIe IMB USB FireWire/1394 i2c/SMBus
Multi-Processor (MP) Support : No
Multi-Processor Advanced PIC (APIC) : Yes
System BIOS : American Megatrends Inc. 0602
Total Memory : 3.5GB DIMM DDR2

Chipset
Model : ASUS P35/G33/G31 Processor to I/O Controller
Front Side Bus Speed : 4x 202MHz (808MHz)
Total Memory : 4GB DIMM DDR2
Memory Bus Speed : 2x 404MHz (808MHz)

Memory Module(s)
Memory Module : Hyundai HYMP125U64CP8-S6 2GB DIMM DDR2 PC2-6400U DDR2-800 (5.0-6-6-18 3-24-6-3)
Memory Module : Hyundai HYMP125U64CP8-S6 2GB DIMM DDR2 PC2-6400U DDR2-800 (5.0-6-6-18 3-24-6-3)

Video System
Adapter : NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT (1GB DDR2, 550MHz/1.28GHz/2x399MHz, PCIe 1.00 x16, PS3.0, VS3.0, 2 Heads)
Adapter : NVIDIA GeForce 9400 GT (1GB DDR2, 550MHz/1.28GHz/2x399MHz, PCIe 1.00 x16, PS3.0, VS3.0)

Graphics Processor
Adapter : GeForce 9400 GT (1.01, 1024MB, 1.40GHz)

Storage Devices
Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 1TB (SATA300, 3.5", 7200rpm, NCQ, 15MB Cache) : 932GB (C (D (E
HP CD-Writer cd16b (ATA, CD-RW, 2MB Cache) : N/A (F
PLEXTOR DVDR PX-740A (ATA33, DVD+-RW, CD-RW, 2MB Cache) : N/A (G

Logical Storage Devices
ICS-001A (C : 98GB (NTFS) @ Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 1TB (SATA300, 3.5", 7200rpm, NCQ, 15MB Cache)
ICS-001B (D : 391GB (NTFS) @ Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 1TB (SATA300, 3.5", 7200rpm, NCQ, 15MB Cache)
ICS-001C (E : 443GB (NTFS) @ Hitachi HDT721010SLA360 1TB (SATA300, 3.5", 7200rpm, NCQ, 15MB Cache)
CD-ROM/DVD (F : N/A @ HP CD-Writer cd16b (ATA, CD-RW, 2MB Cache)
CD-ROM/DVD (G : N/A @ PLEXTOR DVDR PX-740A (ATA33, DVD+-RW, CD-RW, 2MB Cache)
3.5" 1.44MB (A : N/A

Peripherals
LPC Hub Controller 1 : ASUS 82801GB/GR (ICH7) LPC Interface Controller
Audio Device : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) High Definition Audio
Audio Codec : VIA VT1708B 8-channel High Definition Audio CODEC
Serial Port(s) : 4
Parallel Port(s) : 1
Disk Controller : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) Ultra ATA Storage Controller
Disk Controller : ASUS 82801GB/GR/GH (ICH7) Serial ATA Storage Controller
USB Controller 1 : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) USB Universal Host Controller
USB Controller 2 : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) USB Universal Host Controller
USB Controller 3 : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) USB Universal Host Controller
USB Controller 4 : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) USB Universal Host Controller
USB Controller 5 : ASUS 82801G (ICH7) USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller
FireWire/1394 Controller 1 : VIA VT6306 VIA Fire II IEEE-1394 OHCI Link Layer Controller
System SMBus Controller 1 : Intel 801xx/63xx SMBus

Printers and Faxes
Printer : NEC SuperScript 1450 PS (1200x1200)
Printer : NEC SuperScript 1450 (600x600)
Printer : Microsoft XPS Document Writer (600x600, Colour)
Printer : Microsoft Office Document Image Writer Driver (200x200)
Printer : Brother PC-FAX (200x200)
Printer : Brother MFC-5840CN Printer (Colour)
Printer : ALPS MD-5000P (600x600, Colour)
Printer : ALPS MD-5000 (600x600, Colour)
Printer : Adobe PDF Converter (4000x4000, Colour)

Scanners and Cameras
Scanner : Brother MFC-5840CN LAN (USB)

Network Services
Network Adapter : Atheros AR8121/AR8113/AR8114 PCI-E Ethernet Controller - Packet Scheduler Miniport (Ethernet, 1Gbps)

Power Management
Mains (AC) Line Status : On-Line

Operating System(s)
Windows System : Microsoft Windows XP Professional 5.01.2600 (Service Pack 3)
Platform Compliance : x86

Historically in the last 5 years or so my Windows 2003 standard servers (your WHS) are more stable than my XP Pro setups. Mostly I think because the install is barebones then you add to it. I basically take the barebones 2003 base and lighten it a bit. (Linux/BSD too has been pretty stable)

BTW the replacement MB that I purchased for my HA server was the identical model, same CPU and memory included. The Version was 1.0 where as the HA server had revision 2.0 (with bad caps). I was lucky to have purchased it for around $70 including CPU / Memory. Once the old MB is replaced will build a duplicate HA server with same said MB. Using only two USB ports to Digi boxes and serial connections (about 18 now) makes the swap only minutes long if the HA box takes a hard fall.

 

[electron]

If it's a hardware issue (power, caps etc), then running prime95 on the XP machine without drivers should trigger the freeze as well. I would probably try it on WHS first, just so you have an idea if prime95 will help you repeat the test.

 

[beelzerob]

Well, thanks to Dan fixing my blog issue, I'll continue this little adventure there. Please feel free to continue with the helpful advice there!