Tyan Tiger 230 Hardcore Freezes in BIOS!

[jade1001]

Fellow geeks,

I just got a Tyan Tiger 230 dual (S2507) Mobo in and installed in it a 40 GB Western Digital HD 7200 RPM on a 80 conductor 40 pin cable as a stand alone on the first IDE cable, a floppy drive, a CD-RW as a stand alone on the second IDE cable, a 3D Prophet III video card (

http://www.hercules.com)

in the AGP slot, one 256 pc133 SDRAM stick in DIMM slot 1, and two PIII 1GHz 133 processors in the Socket 370's.

I've had a miserable time getting Win2k installed. I finally got it installed after a series of hardcore freezes (where you have to press the reset button). I updated the ESCD which seemed to have done the trick and allowed me to install windows.

Now I am trying to do Windows updates which requires me to install a Network Card. When I install it, it hardcore freezes again. It freezes when doing a memory check in the beginning after post (if I press escape in time I can get out of that and attempt to get to windows). If I make it past the memory check it will freeze at the first Windows 2000 splash screen when the indicator bar is about half way through.

I updated the ECSD after installing the network card and it doesn't seem to make a difference. I tried two different 3COM cards and a Netgear card. I also tried installing a Sound Card and got the same result. I tried different slots updating the ECSD each time.

Since it likes to freeze up doing the memory test I decided to try different memory. I tried 3 different brands of pc133 SDRAM and it does the same thing.

Check this out, if I can make it past the memory check and into BIOS, it will hard freeze in BIOS! <-- I've never had a machine hard freeze in BIOS.

All this hardware that I am using on this Mobo was once installed on the MSI 694X chipset Mobo and ran fine (did a lot of hardcore fragging online with it). I decided to try to upgrade to the Tyan Tiger 230 because MSI had decided to quit making that Mobo and BIOS upgrades for it.

I did install the via 4 in 1 chipset update and got service pack 2 installed via CD.

I can get into safe mode when there is a card in the pci slot and view IRQ's. Everything is on its own IRQ except the USB which I think is normal for USB.

Peripheral wise, I have a monitor and keyboard. Nothing else. No mouse, no cam, no nothing.

I emailed their techsupport and got an electronic response. After that I never heard from em again.

If anybody has any ideas on this puzzler, I am all ears,

jade>:O>

 

[CitrixEngineer]

It could be a faulty processor - what you're describing is very much reminiscent of a PIII 450 I bought at a computer fair recently;

It got past the memory counter, so this is not exactly the same fault, but where the similarities occur is &quot;freezing&quot; when changing BIOS settings.

The reason I suspected the processor of having a memory addressing issue was that if I tried to boot into Windows ME, or 2000, or Linux, it would get a short way, then freeze, unless going into Windows 9x in safe mode. I tested using a plain DOS boot disk (6.22), and it booted fine. I then booted with memory managers (himem.sys and emm386.exe), and got a recursive memory addressing error message.

I replaced the processor, and all was well.

This was on an ABIT VT6X4 (Via chipset) with 128Mb 133Mhz Crucial RAM, Voodoo3 3000 and Quantuum 17.5Gb Hdd.

I had never seen a processor go flaky like this until the PIII range. I've been working with Intel procs since the 8088. :-(

What happens if you run it with just one of your two procs?

CE

 

[jade1001]

I haven't tried that yet. But I will.

Thanks in advanced,

jade>:O>

 

[jade1001]

CitrixEngineer,

That was it. I took out my second processor and my hardcore freezes when away. Never froze once. In fact, removing that second processor help to make my machine seem a little faster than what it was before.

Before viewing your post I tried putting it all back in the other motherboard to see if it still froze and it did. I got the BSOD that read INVALID_PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA. <--Kind of interesting. This would lead one to think memory. I guess in my situation it was my cache.

Thanks alot,

jade>:O>