System freezing

[GigaCDC]

Hi All,

I'm looking for help. I've a P35-DS4 m/b with a pair of mirrored discs running XP Pro off the purple Gigabyte Sata RAID and four discs running as RAID 0/1 off the yellow ICH9R connectors, there's a couple of non-raided standalone discs running off the remaining ICH9R connectors. There's 2 Gb RAM and the popular Intel Q6600. BIOS is F12. Video is a Radeon X1950.

Whenever the machine gets heavily loaded, it freezes repeatedly and I get a popup saying, "A jack has been plugged in". (It used to present the Audio configuration panel but I toggled that off). The only solution is to switch off, wait a few seconds and re-start so I guess it's a hardware problem. Speedfan suggests that the CPU is running around 38-44C, not excessively high.

Sniffing around in Event Manager, I get a whole series of entries showing Event 9 (atapi), event 9 (jraid) and an occasional event 12. Does rather suggest a disc problem, wot? In which case, what's the audio system to do with it? Had there been a consistency, I could have traced it but it looks as if there may be two problems in completely different areas which is really confusing me.

Can anybody tell me what's going wrong and what I need to do to resolve this irritating problem - if I had any hair left, I'd tear it out for want of a solution?


Richard

[jonj678]

Does the system pass a few hours of memtest? If it throws errors this is the problem, the ram getting things wrong can cause all kinds of mess.

If it passes, I'm pretty certain the problem is a corrupt copy of XP. You can either backup and reinstall or boot from a linux livecd and see if the problem can be repeated outside of the windows environment.

Could also be a combination, i.e. bad ram has slowly broken more and more of windows. Memtest is definitely the first step to diagnosis.

[GigaCDC]

Thank you for the suggestion, a logical one.

Will try, probably next week as the office is currently closed.


Richard