Problem

[shvarz]

Oh great!  My comuter has some serious problems.  I'll share in hope someone might have an idea:

I've had this K7S5A board for almost three years now, but recently something horrible happened and I can't figure out what's wrong.  maybe you guys can...  

Anyway, out of nowhere I started getting these weird crashes from Windows to BSD.  When I tried to re-boot, it would either give BSD, or stay quiet (not a single beep, no picture, nothing, just fans spinning) or load fine.  Mostly the first two.  I started pulling out hardware to try to figure out what's causing this.  And at some point (when it was the "quiet" phase) I reset BIOS and was able to boot.  That worked a couple of more times.  But then it just went to "quiet" again and now nothing could revive it.

I read some stuff on boards about how CMOS battery could go bad, so I stopped by RadioShack today and got a new battery: immediately computer went to "one beep and load Windows".  Yay!  But it can't load Windows now (I have win 2K Pro)!  During load I get BSD, which says that my BIOS is not "fully compatible with ACPI" and how I need to do this and that during install to avoid this message.

I went back to the old battery, but the symptoms are the same...  What do I do now?  What can be causing this?  I am kinda thinking about changing MB, but I've been lazy about following tech news and at this point have no clue what I should buy.  Anyway, would be nice to get my old K7S5A back and running at least for a while...

[Ulciscor]

Have you tried clearing the CMOS while using the new battery?

[Numsgil]

Have you tried getting a new computer.   :lol:

I suppose that's not helpful.  Perhaps you need to upgrade your BIOS?

[Shen]

That sounds suspiciously like some sort of hardware failure. Could try a format to se if it helps, theres a small chance its just Windows decided to spray random files over your Hard drive. Do you have an original 2K CD?

Check Event Viewer in Start>Settings>Control Panels> Administrative Tools>Event Viewer. See if theres anything obviously bad in the system tab, like millions of errors.

If not its likely your mobo or memory. Gunna have to fork out £100 for new hardware. Hey cheer up! Buying new computer stuff is fun!

[shvarz]

Ulciscor: Yes, many times.  At first it seemed to help, but then later that was not helping either.

Nums:  The BIOS was good enough before.  As I said, I had this board for almost 3 years with now problems until recently.  I did not do any recent upgrades or installs that could cause this.

Shen: I can't get to Windows!  The situation now is that board checks fine (single beep), starts loading Windows, then gives up saying that my BIOS is not fully ACPI-compliant.  Weird...

[PurpleYouko]

Can you boot in safe mode? or can't you even get that far?

How about going into BIOS and resaving it?

[Numsgil]

I think it's a problem with one of you're ram cards.

I managed to find this

Q:  I have 4 GB of memory and Windows NT will give an error message "Bios is not fully ACPI compliant."  How do I fix this?

A:  You will need to uninstall one RDRAM module and then install Windows NT 4.0.  After you have completed the install of Windows NT you can re-install the RDRAM module.

[shvarz]

PY: No, can't get into safe mode either.  What do you mean by resaving bios?  Flashing it again?  I'm gonna try that.

Nums:  Thanks for looking, but that's not relevant at all.  First, it is a different MB, second - different kind of RAM and third - the described problem occurs during installation, mine is after crash of a working system.

Some people say it may be a power supply going bad.  So visited a local Fry's, left 400 bucks there and left with a new mobo+CPU and with a new power supply.  Tha plan is: a) check if new power supply helps; B) check if re-flashing bios helps; c) if nothing helps install new MoBo.  I'll update on situation later today.

[vryko]

what are the settings for acpi in your bios?

probably your bios is reset by changing the battery so you have to reconfigure it.

[shvarz]

Yeah, I reset the BIOS and re-configured it and tried tons of other stuff too.  Have no idea what was wrong there.  Bascally I got a whole new computer now, as I bought MB, CPU, memory and PSU.  All for $450.  So I have a pretty nice comp now.  It was time to upgrade anyway.

Here is one more question:  I have two drives, one main one and one just for storage.  When I hooked them up asembling the new system, I mixed them up (set storage as master).  As a result I installed windows on that drive.  I cursed, and installed windows on the other drive (stupid me).  Now during boot I am given a choice of which windows to load.  How do I get rid of that and just keep one OS?  Formatting drives is not an option, as the "storage" drive has lots of other stuff that I want to keep.  But I can move stuff around and re-assign letters using Partition magic if that's gonna help me somehow.

[shvarz]

Oh, and another question:  What's the best way to set up swap file for windows.  Some people say to make a separate partition for it (and that does sound reasonable to me), but I am not sure where I should place that partition - beggining of drive, end of drive, same physical drive or the second physical drive...  Anyone here knowledgable in that?

[Shen]

Put your swap partition on the fastest drive, its going to get used more than most stuff.

As for the duel windows thingy, I dunno. You could try the hilarious method of renaming the windows directory to see if it goes insane or not. If it complains just rename it back to original. If it doesnt go mad then just delete it. Although Im sure theres some method to unset it as a system drive, I just dont know how.

[shvarz]

I found out a way to deal with two installs: I need to edit the boot.ini file to remove the second copy of windows.

As for swap file: both drives are almost identical, the just have different capacities.  The question is whether I should keep it on the same drive as Windows or on a different drive and if that's going to affect the speed of access.  I am a bit hesitant about having windows on one drive and swap on the other: if either goes bad my system is screwed.  So I guess I should put it on the same drive but in a separate partition.  The question is though - should I place that partition in the beginning of the drive, or at the end - which part is read faster?  I think it's the beginning, but I am not 100% sure.

Am I making sense?

[Shen]

I dont think theres any real difference in speed between different areas of the HD. That said I would place it at the beginning, that way you wont get as much fragmentation which will increase access time for other applications a bit.

Also, my knowledge of HDs might be way out of date here, maybe someone can correct me. But dont HDs slow down if they are on the same IDE chain as CD/DVD drives? Might want to take that into consideration and put your HDs together and other drives on the other chain. Although EIDE may have sorted that. I feel old :(

[shvarz]

I dont think theres any real difference in speed between different areas of the HD.

Cool.

That said I would place it at the beginning, that way you wont get as much fragmentation which will increase access time for other applications a bit.

It will be a separate partition, so fragmentation does not come into play at all.  That's the whole reason to put it on a separate partition.

But dont HDs slow down if they are on the same IDE chain as CD/DVD drives?

I think they still do.  And yes, I am taking that into account.