Hardware & BSoD help

[FreeDoM]

A friend of mine gave me a motherboard and cpu and i've been having troubles ever since.
It's a HP Motherboard with Via chipset. Amd Athlon xp, 2200 1.8 Ghz. I'm using 2100 DDR Ram. Ever since i installed it, my systems been restarting (BsoD) right off the bat. It wouldn't even load windows. Finally, after switching some IDE cables around, i actually put the HDD in Secondary Master. It let me install winxp without any BSoD. Everything loaded fine. Now all of a sudden whenever i run a .exe, try to uninstall programs, or even certain sites.. (or whenever my pos computer feels like it) up pops the blue screen. The errors vary too. Recently it's been "Page_fault_in_non_paged area" sometimes pointing to ntfs.sys. Rarely i'll get a "IRQL_not_equal_or_less" which is suppost to be a driver conflict. I've worked on this damn thing for a week now, stripped all my cards and used only onboard stuff, practically just the motherboard and i still get IRQL errors, tried 2 HDD, formatted. I've installed every driver known to man. Flashed Bios(which sucks since it doesn't even let me disable Bios Shadowing/caching) The only thing i can think of is the PSU which i just bought, and it worked on my old mobo/cpu. The ram is brand new, no errors. The HDD is older (ata 100) which supposidly the Mobo can support ata 133, it shouldn't matter though. It's not my Video card, floppy, dvd Rom, lan card, sound card, or anything. Heat's not a problem, (50-55c) You'll have to be a total gear head to help me, i'm about to throw this damn motherboard out the window.

 

[Reptile]

have you tried resetting your bios? i had this problem when i got a mainboard of a friend of mine, flashing the bios doesnt mean the settings have been reset. so if there are setting in it that you might have overlooked this would fix it. i´d say give it a try

 

[DiebytheSword]

I ran into a very similar problem with a via chipset and an ATA66 HDD, avoid those two like the plauge in an XP situation. My advice? Get a newer HD, the IDE (intergrated drive electronics) are probably not compatable with XP. The IDE controller on the board might be another problem, in which case I suggest buying an Nforce2 board.

In all likelyhood, the IRQL error (which I also saw in abundance during installs) is refering to XP's native drivers sucking alot of ass on VIA's chipset. If you do manage to install XP, it won't last long. Mine lasted a week, and then the NTFS table became unstable and a bad write back locked me out of Windows.

 

[Kurt`]

Heat's not a problem, (50-55c)

That's kind of high. I have the same CPU (2200+), and it runs at 35 degrees C with a standard 5,000 rpm fan. You should probably detach the heatsink and reapply the thermal compound to it.

As for the actual problem, only advice I could give has already been posted.

 

[FreeDoM]

Well i applied thermal compound earlier. My ventilation isn't that great, so 50c is fine for what i have. The motherboard worked when my friend used it, only his HDD was ata 133. It should run my ATA 100 though. I've tried using default values in my Bios, my options there are pretty limited.
Actually something does come to mind. In my bios theres a Serial and Parrallel option, both are enabled, below each you can select which IRQ you want, for.. one of them it also askes for some wierd option, like output only,epe,ece or something.

 

[DiebytheSword]

I'm telling you it's your IDE controller and IDE Drive, I had the same exact symptoms and it's not fixable under XP.

What brand drive are you using? I had a Western Digital, so I was fairly sure that it was the mixture of the two at the time.

 

[FreeDoM]

Er rather, i have your aim, log on.

 

[DiebytheSword]

Sorry Freedom, I went to work and didn't see this untill Just now, I'll turn it on tonight when I go on later, but I won't be on untill almost 2AM.

I'll catch you tommorow if not.