Hi, I am having several problems with my computer and I can't really figure out what's happening. My computer is: MB: Asrock P4S61 with AMIBIOS (originally with 1.90, upgraded to 2.10) Processor: Pentium 4 Prescott 2.8 Graphics Card: NVidia GeForce 7300 GT with 512 MB DDR (AGP 8x) Ram: AVRO 512 MB DDR 400 HDD: Samsung ATA 250GB OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional SP2 Sometimes when i try to turn on my computer, the graphics card doesn't send any signal to the monitor and nothing appears on the screen. Some other times, The monitor turns on but it only shows an "2D" message on the lower right corner of the screen. When I am lucky, the bios boots the operative system but I receive multiple Blue Screen error messages that makes me reset the computer such as: -DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL (0xFFFFFFFF) -0x0000007E -PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (0x00000050) [ftdisk.sys] -0x00000025 [ntfs.sys] -BAD_POOL_CALLER (0x000000C2) When I am really lucky, the operative system boots without problems and i can use Windows without problems. but about after 30 minutes, the computer freezes completely, making me to restart it again. First I thought It was a problem on the graphics card, i removed the graphics card and connected the monitor cable to the on board VGA, but the problem persisted. Then I thought the problem was caused by the RAM, so i changed my ram module with a friend, but again, the problem persisted. So i took off every usb and other cables attached to the board, leaving only the essential: monitor and power... and disconnected the hard disk and cd rom drives from the board, but i still got the 2D message and sometimes the monitor wouldn't show anything. So the only thing that could be defective are the motherboard and/or the processor, I guess. I was wondering if I could flash the AMIBIOS to 2.50 version, it would solve the problem. Other thing that came to my head was that my VGA cable is broken inside and sometimes i have to screw it to get every color, otherwise i get missing colors like red. The VGA cable could be making short-circuits on the AGP card. I would be very glad with any help to make me solve the problem thanks in advance.
this error is quite often caused by faulty RAM, but as you've tried differend RAM (assuming you tried making sure the ram was seated correctly) i, as you did, suspect the mobo, just for the sake of it try testing your RAM with memtest86+ (download & run it from either floppy or CD for about 12 hours or longer, ignore the results unless you get 200+ errors) possibly, also try the barebone approach, by disconnecting eveything from the mobo except CPU, RAM, Grfx card & PSU flashing the BIOS should only be done as a last resort, or if you know that flashing it to a certain version will fix your problem this sounds unrelated to you main problem
Thanks for the help one other thing i saw is that the bios detects other sizes of RAM memory. The default size is 284288, i guess, and the BIOS shows 284166, for example. i get a BSOD whenever this happens
