Legit Reviews

K guys, normally i can trouble shoot my way through just about anything but this one has me stumped.

My computer has been rebooting at random for some time now. I finally figured out that it was set to reboot automatically when it BSODed. No I'm trying to find the source of the BSOD.

So here is what i do know. I have seen two screens now, one when it rebooted while i was using it, the other over night while it was folding. The error message for the first one was an IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL. This issue came up when i installed SP2. I also changed my hardware configuration at the same time as follows:

Installed SP2 on a fresh formated drive
moved my system disk to 2x 160 SATA Seagate drives
swapped from a gforce2MX to a matrox G450 to support dual monitors

The only other thing that changed was my power supply but i have since swapped with a known good supply and the issues continue. I also use a hacked bios that i got from ocfourms.com i don't remember the version but i know i think its a tictac d12 with SATA support.

<edit> its the d23 subzero not %100 but very close to sure </edit>

My theory is as follows: The bios is conflicting with either the display adapter as it BSODed while playing back a quicktime video, or the bios is conflicting with the SATA drives. Either way i plan on doing a bios update over thanksgiving break.

So i guess what I'm looking for is some confirmation from people who have seen this sort of issue before or have a link to a similar problem. Also if anyone has any alternative suggestions as to the cause I'm open to ideas. Needless to say it would be nice if i could get my system stable again as it used to run just fine before my last upgrade at the same overclock and folding 27/7.

infinitevalence wrote:Needless to say it would be nice if i could get my system stable again as it used to run just fine before my last upgrade at the same overclock and folding 27/7.

Man, I wish my planet had 27 hour days! That's more beer drinking time!

To make this post somewhat relavent, I would have to say that bios updates fix so manythings... the fact that you are using a hacked bios would seem like a good thing to initially rule out. The next thing i would say is a reformat, but if I read you post correctly, you seem to have already done that. Good luck!

Man talk about a happy typo, i wish there were 27hrs in a day so i could get somthing aproching normal sleep. Thanks for the input, the bios is my prime suspect at the moment, then its the g450, matrox is known to write some of the worst drivers ever.

I would try your old video card and see if that's the problem. It could be your hacked Bios not liking the card.

I run into that BSOD when I push an O/C on a system with a RAID array too far, not sure that is the issue here, but i will say I've only seen that message on a system that was O/Ced

I will say I was getting alot of BSOD when I was trying to push some ram way to far.................. I was going for a 280 FSB on my A64 system, I could get it into Windows and that was about it......................

well i know its not the ram as i have tested using memtest and its pc4000. Nate also has tested it using the RSTpro, so i think its safe to say the ram is good.

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL can be bad hardware or bios problem, but it is often a bad driver.
And it occurs frequently after an SP2 upgrade.
depending on the memory location (those numbers on the bsod) it maybe fixable. check the MS knowledge base.

interestingly enough i had another one but this time it was totaly different. this time it was a BAD_POOL_CALLER. not that helps any. So needless to say i have since pulled my matrox g450 out and put back in my gforce2MX. I also used this operitunity to perform the L12 mod on my motherboard, add some heatsinks to the voltage regulation, and update my bios to a new different hacked bios, i am now using one based off of the D22. so far so good we shall see if everything works the way i want it to.

So far so good i have had a very sucseful few days of flashing and testing new bios's. Im going to verify my new overclock but i am sitting happy at 227 fsb. All i need to do is find my cpu overclock and call it a week.

Alright, I ran into this same problem a while back and have been doing some tinering. First i disabled the Indexing service within windows and turned off system restore. That seemed to help...for awhile. Then the problem returned, to the point where when I tried to defrag or run my anti-virus I'd get BSODs every time. So I decided to move my page file. I used Partition Magic and created a small volume on my backup hard drive. I set it to about 2000 MB and just named it page file. I then went into system properties and turned off the page file on my C: drive, and set it up as a fixed page file in the volume I created on the backup drive. (I have 1024MB of RAM, so 1.5 times would be about 1534MB) I set the page file at 1534MB, rebooted, and haven't had one BSOD since......knock on wood

Nice, i have sometimes thought that windows might not like paging on a RAID 0 drive, it seems that my problems have gone away since i spent all that time testing bios's, though i did find my systme locked up the other day, black screen and no response, so i rebooted and it came right up. i might look into using my 120gb western digital for a page/swap drive.