Symptoms: - Win7 (two alternatives, no strong pattern but the latter usually happens after the first unless given downtime) - Boots fine at full 1920x1200 resolution. System hangs with blue artifacts when GPU under load. - Boots at 800x600 with blue artifacts, GPU not recognised for games etc (when this happens the BIOS and Spinrite have random characters swapped eg 0.xhk% completion) - Vista - BSOD on boot referencing Nvidia Drivers - More recently Vista refuses to boot, wants OS disk to repair, when inserted wants to reinstall. This drive recently (after problem first reared it's ugly head) came up with errors with an Ubuntu liveCD so I ran Spinrite on it and it recovered a sector. GPU Temp I can't remember whether it's normal for my 8800GT, but when I swapped PCI-e slots, shortly after shutting down (idle when booted) the cooler/PCB felt pretty hot. Can't see any dust blocking airflow through the heatsink and I have decent airflow in my CM Cosmos though. Possibly Unrelated - Drive I'm using to boot Win7 has come up with a S.M.A.R.T error (-35/-35 sectors reallocated). Win7 says backup the disk. Gave Spinrite a go and that recovered one sector but obviously couldn't do anything about the error. Notable Information: - I replaced my motherboard in March (maybe not so notable?). - I added another 2GB of RAM a couple of weeks ago. Tried: - Reseat RAM. - Boot without the new RAM. - Reseat GPU. - Switched PCI-e slots for the GPU. - Tried another computer with my monitor to no avail. - Prime95 stress test (RAM intensive) - I have a GTX 460 arriving tomorrow because when I ordered it I was more or less sure it was the GPU that was the problem. System Configuration: Asus Maximus Gene II Intel Q9300 @ 3.2Ghz 4GB (4x1) Corsair 800Mhz DDR2 BFG Geforce 8800GT 512MB OC2 Hiper 580W Plea For Help: I've been trying to fix this for a week or so now and as far as I can tell, I've narrowed it down to GPU/PSU/motherboard (possibly). I needed a GPU upgrade anyway but if it turns out my PSU is at fault I wouldn't mind going modular. I thought it was pretty odd that those drives have had problems as well as the GPU, which would push me more towards PSU, but that GPU temp seemed pretty hairy. I'll post tomorrow as to whether the new GPU makes any difference but I just wanted to see if anyone had any experience with a problem like this. Thanks in advance
The symptoms you're describing can all be attributed to a faulty/dying southbridge. Whilst I'm not certain that's the problem in your case, I would try and get hold of a known good board from a friend or friendly forum bod in your area and testbed the good board with all your other components; adding them one at a time in an effort to replicate the fault. If you need any more help, post away or email me and I'll do what I can.
Thanks for the reply, Bing. Since the first board I bought for a custom rig was a dud, I've always been suspicious of motherboards, but in this case it seems to be my GPU at fault after all. Got my GTX 460 in today and all appears to be well. Bit anticlimactic to be honest, but I can't say I'm not relieved.
I haven't. I was planning on moving my Win7 install to another disk anyway so I didn't think it too much of an issue. I did run Spinrite on it though. Something still feels off. Booting into an Ubuntu LiveCD I get flashes of green/purple noise and the odd thing in the BIOS. I also had an OC failure so I'm at 3.0Ghz at the moment.
Now I'm getting a "BOOTMGR is missing, Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" loop regardless of what I do. Time to declare the motherboard dead? Bing, you might've been right all along.
Bootmgr is on the Hard disk. sounds like a failing HDD to me thats corrupted a lot of the OS and now the boot sectors too. honestly run seatools for DOS on it and run the short test and i bet it fails.
