Athlon Processor Lock-up?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Boaby
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Boaby

Hello folks,

I have a problem with my athlon 64bit 3700 processor. Every time I try
to install Windows XP Pro 32bit on to my new custom built PC. Windows
hangs during 'setup is now going to install files. This will take
several minutes'

The LED on my PC and EIDE 52x cd rom LED just suddenly goes dead. I
tried to install Linux Debian and still the problem persist while linux
is trying to install file on to my hard drive. The LED light just simply
goes dead?

My computer specifications are:

LanParty nf4 ultra D.
AMD Athlon 64 3700
512 mb DRR 400mhz
3 EIDE HD / CD ROM / DVD / floppy
Gforce 6800 ultra PCI express.

I did notice my PC is quite warm and my bios is set to shut off cpu at
70'C / 155f. I even tried to disabling the option to see if this help
but no luck.

Could mean I need an extra fan to cool the pc as I have only got one fan
for the CPU or it could be my hard drive is the real bottleneck. Might
need to get an SATA HD. Can you get a SATA CD ROM / DVD RW these days?

I just don't know what is causing this.

Any advice would be helpful.

Cheers.

Bob
 
Boaby said:
Hello folks,

I have a problem with my athlon 64bit 3700 processor. Every time I try to
install Windows XP Pro 32bit on to my new custom built PC. Windows hangs
during 'setup is now going to install files. This will take several
minutes'

The LED on my PC and EIDE 52x cd rom LED just suddenly goes dead. I tried
to install Linux Debian and still the problem persist while linux is
trying to install file on to my hard drive. The LED light just simply goes
dead?

My computer specifications are:

LanParty nf4 ultra D.
AMD Athlon 64 3700
512 mb DRR 400mhz
3 EIDE HD / CD ROM / DVD / floppy
Gforce 6800 ultra PCI express.

I did notice my PC is quite warm and my bios is set to shut off cpu at
70'C / 155f. I even tried to disabling the option to see if this help but
no luck.

Could mean I need an extra fan to cool the pc as I have only got one fan
for the CPU or it could be my hard drive is the real bottleneck. Might
need to get an SATA HD. Can you get a SATA CD ROM / DVD RW these days?

I just don't know what is causing this.

Any advice would be helpful.

Cheers.

Bob
Click to expand...

Have you tried a different CD/DVD ROM drive? In both cases, you are
describing a failure while files are being read from the installation media.
 
Actually there can be a number of problems that cause this besides the
CDROM drive. First I would check to see if anything was "overclocked" in
the BIOS. Every bios I know has a "set defaults" setup which will
usually set up conservative memory timings. Secondly, the next problem
is in the memory - sometimes it won't work reliably. If you can find a
bootable Linux Rescue disk (or your bios has a self-memory option) test
out the memory access.

Now if you have made sure the default conservative BIOS parameters are
set and that you memory works reliably under some memory test program I
would begin to look at two other things. First is to make sure your
processor is staying "cool": an overheating processor (or some other
major component) will fail in this way. What I usually do is get some
"oxygen in a can" spray (not O2 but compressed air). Spraying it on the
major components will cool them down. If this works you have a cooling
issue - fix it.

The other problem that will happen is that you have too small a power
supply (as in under-sized). This is almost always a killer of a system.
Make sure you have a good PS with sufficient capacity.

Finally, check out the CDROM and HDs. Both can cause the same problems.
The easiest way is to swap them out with others. If you can't do that
find a test program that will do r/w tests on a disk (a few are
available on the net). Find a good CDROM testing program and try those.

Another thing I would do is to make sure the cables are seated
correctly. Sometimes you can have funny kinks in cables, especially the
wide ones, that will cause all kinds of problems, mostly do to
cross-talk. So make sure they are seated properly and make certain there
are no kinks. If you can, make sure they are isolated from one another -
this might help the airflow and prevent some cross-talk.

Hope this helps...
Chuck Wegrzyn
(e-mail address removed)
 
Hello folks,

I have a problem with my athlon 64bit 3700 processor. Every time I try
to install Windows XP Pro 32bit on to my new custom built PC. Windows
hangs during 'setup is now going to install files. This will take
several minutes'

The LED on my PC and EIDE 52x cd rom LED just suddenly goes dead. I
tried to install Linux Debian and still the problem persist while linux
is trying to install file on to my hard drive. The LED light just simply
goes dead?

My computer specifications are:

LanParty nf4 ultra D.
AMD Athlon 64 3700
512 mb DRR 400mhz
3 EIDE HD / CD ROM / DVD / floppy
Gforce 6800 ultra PCI express.

I did notice my PC is quite warm and my bios is set to shut off cpu at
70'C / 155f. I even tried to disabling the option to see if this help
but no luck.

Could mean I need an extra fan to cool the pc as I have only got one fan
for the CPU or it could be my hard drive is the real bottleneck. Might
need to get an SATA HD. Can you get a SATA CD ROM / DVD RW these days?

I just don't know what is causing this.

Any advice would be helpful.

Cheers.

Bob
Click to expand...

Take a look at the CPU temperature in the BIOS, when idling it should be
in the low 40s or less, my dual core 4400+ idles at 34C. One thing that
can cause a problem is the SmartFan feature on A64 motherboards, go
into the BIOS and turn that off so that the CPU fan is running all the
time, then try and do your OS install. The SmartFan feature works fine on
my 3800+ system (130nm CPU) but not on my 4400+ (dual core, 90nm). On my
4400+ I had all sorts of stability problems including kernel panics on
booting when the SmartFan feature was enabled. I suspect that there are
BIOS bugs in the temperature monitoring section of some BIOSs when using
90nm CPUs. My motherboards are MSI but everybody uses the same BIOS so
chances are the LanParty has the same problem.
 
I have a problem with my athlon 64bit 3700 processor. Every time I try
to install Windows XP Pro 32bit on to my new custom built PC. Windows
hangs during 'setup is now going to install files. This will take
several minutes'

The LED on my PC and EIDE 52x cd rom LED just suddenly goes dead. I
tried to install Linux Debian and still the problem persist while linux
is trying to install file on to my hard drive. The LED light just simply
goes dead?

3 EIDE HD / CD ROM / DVD / floppy

I just don't know what is causing this.

Any advice would be helpful.
Click to expand...

If installing from CD, try disconnecting the DVD drive until after
install. Looks to me like the installer is getting confused on which drive
to read from. This could be because one device is jumpered to slave on a
channel by itself (OS/2 won't install on a system like this), or something
else. But if you have a lone dvd or cdrom drive on a channel, make sure
it's jumpered as master. Good luck.
 
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