P4B gone mad - or cracked or cursed ??

  • Thread starter Thread starter Arifi Koseoglu
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A

Arifi Koseoglu

Hello everyone.

Below I am going to summarize the hell I have gone through the last two
days - and will GREATLY appreciate any suggestions.

TIA


The story:

I had been living happily with my Asus P4B - based Intel P4/2000 system with
896 MB RAM for almost a year. Last week I bought a new motherboard, cpu,
RAM, disks and decided to promote the veteran P4B to be our internal
document management server.

During this operation I only changed the case with a bigger (but old) one.
Same VGA card (PCI), same Network card, same disks, same RAM, same CPU.

I installed Windows 2000 Server. No problems. Installed W2K SP4. No
problems. Joined our domain. No problems. Surfed the net no problems... Then
I attempted to copy a large file (approx. 4 GBs) from another PC on the
network - and got a lock-up !!!??. I rebooted, tried again - another lockup.
Damn what was going on? I tried a smaller file (2GB) - it copied fine. Tried
the smaller file again - this time it locked up.

I copied the file I had been able to transfer around on the same disk and to
and from the second disk on the PC several times without any problems, so I
ruled out faulty disks.

I copied the files to another PC from the source location (several times) -
this ruled out any problems on the source side of the network.

I thought maybe it was the network card. I tried with three different cards
(all stripped from working systems), same behavior. Updated drivers, same
lockup. Played with NIC settings on the driver, same lockup. This ruled out
NIC problems.

I tried all combinations of RAM modules, same behavior - this ruled out
faulty RAM chips.

I moved the NIC card into all possible PCI slots - same lockup.

I installed W2K Professional, thinking that it is a problem with the W2K
server and NIC (while on my desk, I ran W2K Professional on this PC) - same
behavior.

I suspected the PSU of the case was no good - bought a new PSU (well, a
cheap 300W one - but hey this is just a plain P4) - same behavior.

I suspected the case was touching the MoBo somewhere and occasionally
causing a short circuit - I removed the MoBo from the case and ran it
outside - same behavior.

I suspected the CPU was running hot (I had noticed that the air flowing out
of the CPU heat sink was cold - so concluded that the heat was not being
properly transferred from the CPU) - but if this were the case, then why
would the system crash ONLY WHEN COPYING FILES FROM THE NETWORK?

I am very careful at such operations and I am pretty sure that I did not do
any move that could cause a crack on the MoBo while transferring between
cases.

Now I am sitting in front of the P4B without knowing what to do but trash
it.

What is there to do ???
Am I missing something?

Best,
-arifi
 
alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus:

I installed Windows 2000 Server. No problems. Installed W2K SP4. No
problems. Joined our domain. No problems. Surfed the net no
problems... Then I attempted to copy a large file (approx. 4 GBs) from
another PC on the network - and got a lock-up !!!??.
Click to expand...


Possibly a dumb question, but do you run W2K on FAT32? In that case it
can't handle files larger than 4GB.

--
CeeBee


"I don't know half of you
half as well as I should like;
and I like less than half of you
half as well as you deserve."
 
CeeBee said:
Possibly a dumb question, but do you run W2K on FAT32? In that case it
can't handle files larger than 4GB.
Click to expand...

Nope, it's NTFS. Not a dumb question at all - at least I was not aware of
such a limitation - never used Fat32.
Thanks anyways.
-arifi
 
Arifi Koseoglu said:
Hello everyone.

Below I am going to summarize the hell I have gone through the last two
days - and will GREATLY appreciate any suggestions.

TIA


The story:

I had been living happily with my Asus P4B - based Intel P4/2000 system with
896 MB RAM for almost a year. Last week I bought a new motherboard, cpu,
RAM, disks and decided to promote the veteran P4B to be our internal
document management server.

During this operation I only changed the case with a bigger (but old) one.
Same VGA card (PCI), same Network card, same disks, same RAM, same CPU.

I installed Windows 2000 Server. No problems. Installed W2K SP4. No
problems. Joined our domain. No problems. Surfed the net no problems... Then
I attempted to copy a large file (approx. 4 GBs) from another PC on the
network - and got a lock-up !!!??. I rebooted, tried again - another lockup.
Damn what was going on? I tried a smaller file (2GB) - it copied fine. Tried
the smaller file again - this time it locked up.

I copied the file I had been able to transfer around on the same disk and to
and from the second disk on the PC several times without any problems, so I
ruled out faulty disks.

I copied the files to another PC from the source location (several times) -
this ruled out any problems on the source side of the network.

I thought maybe it was the network card. I tried with three different cards
(all stripped from working systems), same behavior. Updated drivers, same
lockup. Played with NIC settings on the driver, same lockup. This ruled out
NIC problems.

I tried all combinations of RAM modules, same behavior - this ruled out
faulty RAM chips.

I moved the NIC card into all possible PCI slots - same lockup.

I installed W2K Professional, thinking that it is a problem with the W2K
server and NIC (while on my desk, I ran W2K Professional on this PC) - same
behavior.

I suspected the PSU of the case was no good - bought a new PSU (well, a
cheap 300W one - but hey this is just a plain P4) - same behavior.

I suspected the case was touching the MoBo somewhere and occasionally
causing a short circuit - I removed the MoBo from the case and ran it
outside - same behavior.

I suspected the CPU was running hot (I had noticed that the air flowing out
of the CPU heat sink was cold - so concluded that the heat was not being
properly transferred from the CPU) - but if this were the case, then why
would the system crash ONLY WHEN COPYING FILES FROM THE NETWORK?

I am very careful at such operations and I am pretty sure that I did not do
any move that could cause a crack on the MoBo while transferring between
cases.

Now I am sitting in front of the P4B without knowing what to do but trash
it.

What is there to do ???
Am I missing something?

Best,
-arifi
Click to expand...

Some suggestions:

1) Some PCI cards don't like sharing IRQ's. Your manual should show that
certain slots are shared (eg 1 and 5) so populating them simultaneously
*could* create problems. To avoid possible conflicts, try putting the VGA
card in slot 2 and NIC in slot 6.

2) Try running a monitoring program such as Asus Probe or Mother Board
Monitor and look for any unusual temperature, voltage or fan problems during
a large file copy.

3) You might want to update your P4B's BIOS if there's a newer one
available.

4) Install the latest chipset drivers from Intel
 
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