XP crashes frequently unless Cache in Bios is turned off

[Vanian]

My original setup had been working fine for months.
Asus v266 mobo
AMD K-7 Porcessor
Nividia geforce 3 Video Card
Hercules Gamesurround sound card

I updated my bios and everything still ran fine. I updated my video drivers and crashes started to happend frequently. The error is usually one of those mindump errors. I put my video drivers back to where they were and the crashes continued. I put the bios back to where it was and the crashes stil continued.

Time to reinstall XP. Not so easy. As soon as the menu comes up to install fresh or repair, I get a crash. Sometimes it just reboots without a message and sometimes it shows an error that starts with a "irq_" or it says "Bad pool" or something odd like that.

I took out all cards and replaced the Geforce 3 card with a very basic PCI card. Same error. I have 2 256 meg memory sticks so I pulled one out and had the same error. I then tried it with the other one. No dice.

I turned off the memory cache in the bios and XP installs, although it takes several hours. After a few reboots, XP doesn't load but I get the menu to go into the setup or launch. XP will launch but very slowly. At this point, if I turn the memory cache in the bios back on, it craps itself again.

I have two hard drives and I tried installing on each with the same results.

The processor has a good fan and is not warm to the touch. I only had the mobo and processor for 6 months but I think it has to be one of the two causing the problems.

Am I overlooking something?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

[AllGamer]

in respose to your title

it's totally kinda "Normal", if it only crashes when the Cache is ON.

if you check on the READ ME files, or other info for NT/2K and XP, they Recomend TURNING OFF, the BIOS cache features, Video cache, etc cache.

the NT kernel works better with all that stuff turned off than on, cuz it has HAL

[Vanian]

With the cache off, it runs incredibly slow. It takes several seconds for a mouseclick to be recognized.

It ran fine for several months with the cache on.

It even crashed when I played a CD in the Windows media player after a short time ( 10 minutes) before I reinstalled XP.

[Peter M]

AllGamer, how far off can advice get? The Hardware Abstraction Layer is just that, a set of drivers that makes the rest of the system easier to port to different platforms. Nothing to do with cacheing.

The chipset and CPU must take care (in hardware) that coherence between caches and main storage is maintained, no matter what the operating system or application software.

A unit that fails to do so is broken. Typically it's not even the cache's fault. More probably, the system is suffering a heat or power supply problem that is masked by the incredible slowness of cacheless operation, which brings power consumption and heat dissipation down by a large margin.

So Vanian, check the CPU cooling and do the math on whether your power supply unit is adequate for the hardware you have.

regards, Peter

[AllGamer]

Asus v266 mobo
AMD K-7 Porcessor
Nividia geforce 3 Video Card
Hercules Gamesurround sound card
and 512 MB of ram.

and you have tried both sticks on its own.

have you tried Clearing your CMOS, and loading the "default BIOS settings" ??

if you are getting IRQ, type of errors, you can quickly rule out what is happening by turning Off ACPI

then set
PCI 1 to use IRQ 11
PCI 2 to use IRQ 10
PCI 3 to use IRQ 9
PCI 4 to use IRQ 5

and turn off Com1 and Com2, also LPT1

you can turn all that back on after you have figured out what was the conflict.

[AllGamer]

basically what Peter said is "how much power (watts) is your PSU capable of"

180w
200w
250w
300w
350w
400w
more ??

[Vanian]

Thank you for the replies.

I will check the cooling. I forget off hand what my power supply is but I think its 400 watts. I haven't cleaered the CMOS yet and restored the BIOS to the default. That's something else to check.

Thanks again.

[Vanian]

I forgot to mention that I also get the system crashes when booting from the CD with the XP cd inside.

I have a heavy duty fan on the processor. I am also going to try another processor by the end of the week if I can't fix it.

[AllGamer]

As you explained on the first post it was pretty obvious it's an IRQ thing.

but i just wanted to get more info before jumping into conclusion

[Vanian]

This is going to sound dumb, but would the bios update cause the conflict?

I followed the instructions on the ASUS website. I just want to make sure it doesn't happen again. Also, how do I clear the CMOS?

Thanks.

[AllGamer]

What is your exact ASUS mobo model ?

v266 is just the chipset.

Yes a BIOS update, can very well cause this.

not as a bug or problem.

it's just the configuration that has been resetted after the upgrade.

i can't answer the jumper question, until i know exactely what ASUS mobo you have

[Vanian]

The motherboard is the A7V266
Via KT266

I reset the CMOS but taking the battery out. I then went into the bios and restored defaults.

The computer still crashes when I try to install XP. It doesn't want to find the hard drive now.

The computer will boot from the CD and give me a BAD_POOL_CALLER message.

[AllGamer]

hmm...

this is what MS has to say about that
http://support.microsoft.com/default...EN-US;q310527&

[BipolarBill]

There are multiple items with the "cache" label in BIOS. With XP, disable everything but:

L1 cache
L2 cache
BIOS caching

BIOS caching must be disabled in some systems because it is loaded to an area of memory which XP likes to have to itself. Keep that in mind.

After a BIOS flash, it's always a good idea to clear CMOS.

[Peter M]

Crashing IRQ handlers are NOT an IRQ conflict, they are a code execution problem - stemming either from bad mass storage, bad RAM, or bad CPU.

When you ruled out power supply and cooling, test your RAM next. www.memtest86.com.

And leave those IRQs alone, for god's sake.

regards, Peter