You've got a point Mike.

This time, I installed XP, my motherboard drivers and then CDClone. I was about to run a test on CDClone and write a test disk when the computer just rebooted from the desktop....no action by me.

Upon restart, it gave me an error message like, "a problem has occurred from Windows attempting to check the license of the computer. Error #xxxxxxx"

I think CDClone is corrupted. Last night I installed all kinds of software w/o any problem.

I am running Western Digital diagnostics on the HD now. I did not do Windows Update yet so I will rule that out. Problem either HD, XP software or CDClone. I guess it could be a driver from MSI, but they are pretty good at correcting these things. I will double check the website.

 

Do you really want to rewrite your boot partition with fdisk /mbr? I think not

 

did u check your memory yet? it's the simplest check, and if that's the problem you save a LOT of trouble. I've had the exact problem in the past, went thru all the trouble you're going thru and when I found out it was just a bad DIMM I was bugged by all the wasted time.

 

I am still working the problem. I've spent most of last week (> 50 hours) on it. Still no solid conclusions.

I believe I have a stable system now on the TNT-2 video card. I sent the Gainward AGP card back (3-year warranty) so I should get that on Thursday. The final retest will be to run a two monitor system and then power down the computer, power off. This is the ultimate re-test. Before, system would run for a while on the AGP card and it could handle normal restarts. But if you did a full power down, system would crash hard.

I have reinstalled all of the Mother Board drivers even the bios. If it crashes one more time, I will immediately buy a new power supply. The power supply voltages look fine, but its hard to monitor all the time.

I will keep you posted. Thanks for all of your comments. It never hurts to have people ask you about idiot checks.

 

You didn't respond to my previous post in this thread so at the risk of repeating myself...

I've seen this problem multiple times and each time it was a problem with the ribbon cable leading to the hard drive - did you change hard-drives or the cable?


[QUOTE]Originally posted by Tim S2K
[B]I am still working the problem.

 

I have swapped hard drives multiple times, but still using the same ribbon cable.

I guess it wouldn't hurt to swap that.

 

Newer ATA-100 drives REQUIRE a different ribbon cable with DOUBLE the number of cables (but the same physical width). A UDMA 66/100 cable such as this:

http://www.buy.com/retail/product.asp?sku=...t=30506&loc=101