Totally stump, second opinion welcome

[mrconfused]

A couple of months back i had this machine and it would freeze up at startup and totally lock. At first all signs pointed to a bad motherboard(bad pci slot/slots) but in the end the soundcard was removed and all was fine. The sound card was not replaced. Whole machine was reformatted and the OS(win98) was reinstalled.

Fast forward to a couple of months later. A couple of days ago i installed a copy of(a copied)photoshop. 2-3 days later a video editing program that was used nearly daily(and never froze) froze not once but twice. Programs now either froze/lock along with the desktop or would reboot the system. This was just the beginning. Things got worse.
Soon the machine would reboot into the bio's everytime it would crash or if a manual restart had to be done. Finally i get the error "checksum failed -defaults loaded" I went out and got a battery to replace the one that was on the board. I then defrag all the drives, download Pc-illian and ran it. No viruses were found, and all the drives were defraged. Still using random programs for random amount of time can freeze the machine or send it into what appears to be a frozen sleep mode, or reboot the system straight into the bios. Pressing the restart button manually would result in the screen going pitch black with no signs that it actually went through with a restart(most of the restarts resulted in that) or it would boot the system up in the bios. The only way to get back to the desktop was to totally shut the machine down from the battery power on switch, wait a few mins then power it back on using the battery power on switch.

I am thinking that it's probably a corrupted cmos chip because of the "checksum error defaults loaded" message i got. But since my problems happen a couple days after i installed photoshop it seems like that might be a cause somehow. It could be a bad power supply but i'm not sure.

The only thing that i am sure of is this. Letting the machine defrag for 4 hours or downloading the anti-virus for 2 hours does nothing to the machine. what i mean by that is none of the problems i mention from above appeared when i did those two actions.

Any help would be great.
Mrconfused

 

[wolluf]

Can I presume you've tried uninstalling photoshop?

 

[DBSSP]

What kind of errors can you pull off of scandisk? Jay
"If the words up and down were reversed, would you trip and fall or trip and fly?"

 

[rockerfellerz]

Check for bad IDE cables, loose screws holding the motherboard, and that all of the cards are seated properly.
You could also clear the cmos and or flash the bios to the latest version. First I would make sure that you have done all of the relevant updates for 98 from microsoft ( critical updates, ide hard drive package, mapped drives shutdown update, etc.)

 

[mudskipper]

Just my 2 cents--
If your motherboard is an Asus board, then some of your worries can be relieved. Although it is very annoying, many Asus boards, if the computer is shut off/reset without using the soft-off feature will boot right up into BIOS. I believe (don't quote me on this one) that it is so that if you have over-clocked the system and it does not POST, then it will reset your CPU speed to a safe setting, boot you up, and put you right onto the screen to adjust the CPU speed. (It is not doing it because you overclocked, just because it did not soft power off). So, if your motherboard is an Asus, then I would not worry about that.

(please correct me if I got the details wrong here). Okay, now the restart problem. When you hit the reset button, you get no post, and then try to power on-you said that it did not work until you flipped the switch and waited 5 minutes or so.... This can be a couple of things. The first thing is that a device on your system may not allow itself to be re-initialized properly.

I, personlly, would unhook all IDE cables, all power (except for the MB power), all cards except video. Let the system POST (won't boot to an OS, that is OK). Hit reset. Does the problem still occur? If so, replace power supply and motherboard, etc until it works (my experience is that apprx %90 of the time, it is PS or MB causing that problem. Now hook everything up. Does the machine still freeze/reboot?

If, after unhooking everything, the system resets fine, then shut off, hook up one thing, try again. Keep going until you find the device that is keeping you from restarting.

IMHO, you have 2 problems, not one. It is possible that you have 1 hardware component that causes both issues, but it would be easier to deal with the problems seperately.

Please post back with info--I am really curious on this one! Also, if anybody else out there has a thought, jump on in here!!

Mudskipper
___________________________________________________________________________________

Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"

 

[ceh4702]

Checksum errors can be caused by bad or imcompatable memory. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[mrconfused]

The cables are all nice and tightly connected. Screws are all solid as well. I can change the ide cables to some brand new ones but the thing is my machine goes into this frozen sleep mode. And when it's in this mode I'm not even getting a video signal from the video card. Monitor light goes to orange. Even after repeat presses on the restart button does not get the machine to go through the boot cycle. I don't see how a bad ide cable can cut the signal from a video card since the data from the card travels straight to the board via agp slot. Nor can i see a bad ide cable kill the restart button mutiple times. But i'll change it just to knock another list. I'm really thinking about clearing the cmos and see if that helps. As for downloading patches from MS, I never did any before and I can't see how photoshop 6 can cause an unpatch win98 to go haywire that badly. But i'll download the patches since i got no options and perhaps i'll uninstalled photoshop completely too.

more suggestions welcomed

Thanks
Mr confused

 

[ceh4702]

Do you have the minimum required amount of memory for photoshop? If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[mudskipper]

Clearing the CMOS should be fine. Go ahead and try it if you like. It would also be one more thing to cross off of the list! Mudskipper
___________________________________________________________________________________

Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"

 

[mrconfused]

Hey mudskipper and all for the reply

Yes i do have a asus motherboard. The problems with

"the restart problem. When you hit the reset button, you get no post, and then try to power on-you said that it did not work until you flipped the switch and waited 5 minutes or so...."

(My machine has a power supply on/off switch in the back and a power on/off + restart button button on the front.)

When the machine first boots up cold, the machine boots up fine with no problems. Now once i use any random program for any random amount of time machine either locks/freeze, reboots to bios or goes black and into frozen sleep mode.


Now when it's lock/frozen pressing the restart causes it to either go into frozen sleep mode(black screen and monitor goes to orange) or it'll have no effect whatso ever and I'll have to do a shutdown via the power supply on/off switch on the back of the machine wait about a few minutes and power it back on at which case the system is running fine again until i start using random programs.

If it went directly into frozen black screen mode pressing the restart also does not seem to do anything, I don't even hear the sound that post makes plus the keyboard lights don't flash like they normally do. Monitor light changes to orange.

In both cases of these cases i have to go and shut down the machine via power supply switch wait a few mins power it back on. Additionally pressing the on/off power button on the front does nothing.


I'll try what you recommended but i'll have to first crap out the machine in order to do what you suggested since most of the problems seem to happen after i run any program.

 

[mudskipper]

I understand. It is odd that it has to crap out before you get the on/off problem. If you were working normally (you can try booting to command prompt only) and hit the reset, that problem doesn't exist??

Anyway, you definitely have a hardware issue for at least the on/off side of the problem (once you hit reset, your software is out of the picture). It sounds more and more like if you can nail that issue, then your others will go away too. I'm really thinking MB/PS, but I'm stubborn that way ;-) Don't just take my word for it though !! Mudskipper
___________________________________________________________________________________

Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"

 

[JimInKS]

It could be the PS but that is kind of hard to swap, so I would try some other things first.

I would try turning off all power management features in the BIOS and in Win98, if you haven't already done this.

I assume all fans are working properly and CPU heat sink is clean and correctly installed.

I would reseat memory and CPU.

If you have extra memory I would swap this out, or if you have 2 sticks already in system try taking one out.

You could also try booting with DOS and just letting the computer run all day and see if it fails this way.

 

[mrconfused]

All power management features are off, did that the first time I built the pc. I'll go and reset the memory, processor, and clean out the entire system again. I have 4 sticks of memory in there. The memory is registered and correct when it boots up cold and i ran a software mem tester on it, doesn't seem like there are any problems there. Software mem testers are not always accurate but i don't really have any spare mem or a hardware mem tester on hand.

I'll try running it from dos mode and see what happens. However i'm already thinking that the machine may not crap out cause no programs are being used.

 

[mudskipper]

Running in dos mode is a very good idea. If it doesn't lock, then when you are done letting it run, try to hit the reset button and see if you get your POST problem!

As for RAM--always a suspect in problems like yours--great idea to check it. If you want to check it, then you can pull out two sticks, see if you error still. Replace those two sticks with the two you pulled out and try again. This is not definitive, but certainly could identify a bad stick if you swap enough! Mudskipper
___________________________________________________________________________________

Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"

 

[mainegeek]

I would try booting from a Windows Boot Disk and do a full surface scan from the Windows CD.

 

[mrconfused]

Well there's some good news and bad news.

Good news: If i do a cold boot up and then hit restart it always works fine. No problems there. I can hit restart within the OS or hit the button. EIther case the machine boots up into win98 with no errors.

Also after a little tweaking around in the bios and deleting Photoshop 6, it now lets me reboot if the screen goes black completely(however the light does still turn orange on the monitor) or if it locks/freezes. It stopped doing the whole frozen sleep mode thing where i have to switch it off via the power supply on/off button. Once it restarts it either goes straight into the bios or it loads the whole checking disk for errors and then loads win98.

Bad news: it's still doing the whole lock/freeze thing as well as the screen going black and monitor light going to orange with random programs at random time. Still not sure what is causing this issue. It also gave a continuous beeping sound when i hit control-alt delete to restart after it locked/froze one of the times i restarted. But hey at least i can restart by pushing the button with no problems now.

On a side note i notice that it seems be locking/freezing, screen going black(sleep mode like) thing a lot more often when I use programs that requires more processing such as a video editing or video encoding program than if i was using a program that didn't use much processing power such as surfing, downloading etc..

I read through the asus user manual again and it states that if the system reboots into the bios it means that the system is not stable and that the cpu internal freq settings are wrong. Now the problem is that i have a 1.7GHZ processor. The lowest setting i can get on it is 1700mhz.
I can't go lower than that. The cpu freq mutiplier is 17.0X and i can't change it manual or otherwise, it's locked. The cpu front side bus freq is at 100. I can change that setting but doing so would result in an overclock as i can't make it lower.

I'm going to run it in dos mode tomorrow after i do the memory swapping bit. I hope it's not a faulty processor cause that would suck. Its only been a little more than one year and a half.

THanks all,
Mr confused

 

[pshankland]

Don't know if this will help but....

If you have a spare graphics card try replacing your original one as I have had a machine do the same sorts of things to me and it was the graphics that was the problem.

 

[mrconfused]

Sorry to disappoint you Pshankland but I tried swapping the video card with one that i borrowed from my friend. The problem is still there. I'm pretty sure at this point that it's not a drive issue since i've also swap harddrives. Memory is pretty much almost off the list as a cause. I'd say the power supply is bad but that fails to explain why at times I can't even get post when i hit restart but everything else is on and running.(the light on the Mboard is on). This leaves only the Processor being totally shot or the MB being shot. As of right now, hitting restart seems like it's doing something but the post-up does not display on the screen(screen is black)the light goes green for a minute then goes orange. Furthermore there are no post-up beeping sounds. Not to mention that i did get a "cmos checksum error -defaults loaded" error.(I did replace the battery and the error message disappear)

While it definitely sounds like a MB problem but when the machine was working, it worked as long as i didn't do anything that required heavy processing. Over the weekend before the whole thing sorta died I ran a software cpu tester(hot cpu tester pro). The min the program ran the whole machine would freeze/lock or reboot into sleep mode.

Can i get some opinions if this is more of a processor prob or MB problem before i start spending money and start replacing parts?

 

[ceh4702]

This could be a hybernation issue. Windows has lousy support for hybernation so I usually turn it off in the BIOS. If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[mudskipper]

My disclaimer--Assuming that the problem is motherboard or CPU, it is more likely to be motherboard

I have seen many boards that, after a reset, do not come back on until power is unplugged for some time. The only thing that gets me, though, is that this is usually pretty consistant. The fact that you can boot into Command Prompt Only is a little funny! Mudskipper
___________________________________________________________________________________

Groucho said it best- "A four year-old child could understand this! Quick! Run out and find me a four year-old child: I can't make heads nor tails out of this!"