Having Trouble with new build
 

Just got the new CPU/Mobo/RAM that is in my sig and I'm having a couple problems. The major one is that since I installed this setup 3 days ago vista has hung up 4 times. It seems to happen when I have mozilla open and everything freezes for 30 seconds and then comes back (sometimes). I just had to do a hard restart and the primary drive where my OS is installed did not show at post and I got a Error Loading OS. Had to turn off completely to get it to show back up.

I did prime95 test for 3 hours yesterday with no errors so I'm inclined to think it's either a board or HDD problem. My Hard drive is probably 3 years old now, it's a WD Cavier 250GB which has had at least a dozen reformats since I got it. I'm also using an older Enermax Noisetaker 485W PSU using 4 to 8pin power adapter. I had it on my old AMD X2 build for 5 years without trouble and was hoping it would be able to power this system. I did however make the mistake of changing the HDD BIOs setting from IDE to AHCI AFTER I installed vista, could this be the source of the problem? Would a reformat or repair be a possible solution? I'm running 2 other drives a 500GB sata and 120GB IDE and Bios has been flashed to new version.

My second problem which is more of an annoyance than anything is that when I select Shut Down in vista it goes threw the shutdown screen and HDD's turn off, however the case and cpu fans keep running and won't shut off until I hold the power button down. I dunno whats happening here, I have the board set to Smart Fan Control - Auto and one of my fans is using a Zalman speed controller. They're all hooked into the board including the VGA Fan. Any thoughts? Vista Power settings are at "High Performance" as suggested by another forum. The temps are within norms cpu 25-50C, chipset 40-45C, HDD 50-56C, GPU 47-60C

Thanks in advance everyone

-Ray

Think the shutdown issue was issued with latest biosses... Did you try HCI memtest to test the rams ?
Think you're on the right track with either the PSU or the HD that has issues with ya current setup...

Is there any other IDE drive hooked up to the mobo ?
I experienced weird slowdowns with my DVD writer connected to the IDE port. Also the IDE writer did sometimes bug my startup ( with slow detection, etc)

Try flashing the bios first (non OC'ed via the Bios Q-Flash function)

Well I already flashed the Bios to F7, which is the latest gigabyte lists for this board. I used the @Bios program they provide because I no longer have a floppy drive and I'm almost positive all my left over floppy discs have long since been degraded. I did the load Bios from file option because I don't have enough faith in my DSL connection to do online. I had this problem with the Bios that shipped with the board too which was F5.

I actually unplugged my 500GB and 120GB HDD and the system has been stable for more than an hour with no freezing, perhaps the hard drives are just enough to put the wattage over the PSU's max. I'll try plugging them in one at a time and see which one gives me problems. Some have reported malfunctioning IDE port with this board. I also only have one IDE device plugged in which is the 120GB.

Test out your HDD using CHKDSK, this should be a basic troubleshoot routine to do in this situation. Defragment too.

Defraged after I installed everything as usual, just ran chkdisk and it did a full test and didn't come up with a report and started vista ok. So I'm guessing it didn't get any errors.

If you want to go to greater lengths a clean install/reformat might help

it's been stable for 4 hours now without my storage drives plugged in, I'll plug them in one at a time and see if it crashes again. If so I might just reformat.

might even be damaged SATA cable

well the satas are brand new but I guess they could be faulty. It would be to bad too cause they are the nicest cables I've got with a motherboard yet. I ran chkdsk on all 3 drives and windows came back with no errors and I haven't had a freeze yet, I'll probably run memtest tonight to be sure it's not bad ram.