Hey everyone,

First off, here's the guts of my homebuild:

AMD Athlon 64 FX-57
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe (with 1303 bios)
2GB G.Skill DDR 500
Western Digital caviar 320GB (SATA) one partition, WinXP home
LG 20x DVD-RW
EVGA 7900GT
Kingwin 450w PSU

Okay, this entire setup has worked perfectly fine in the past, and now I can't figure out what it's problem is.

First off, I started getting a bsod randomly, a 0xF4 error, which tells me that I have a critical object termination. When it reboots, I can start in safe mode, then restart from within windows and it boots fine back to regular windows. I thought it was either the BIOS or the RAM, so I started with the easiest and took out the RAM sticks systematically, and it appeared that I had a bad one. So I ran my pc that way for a day, then it did it again. I put the "bad" RAM back in, and decided it must be the BIOS. Flashed it to the latest non-beta version, it did it without a problem, and ran for a little while then did the same bsod.

Within BIOS, I have a problem with the HDD being detected. It's a SATA, so it is showing up as my 3rd primary IDE, with my DVD-RW showing up as the secondary IDE. I have made sure the jumper on the DVD-RW is not in master position, I have NO jumpers on the HDD, and it has run fine this way. Suddenly, after flashing the BIOS and running windows for a while, the HDD is not found.

What's strange is that I can get it to the WinXP splash, and then maybe 4 seconds into that, I get a bsod that goes so fast I can't read what it says, and it reboots and continues in this obnoxious cycle. Safe mode does the same thing.

I threw the WinXP cd in to do a repair/chkdsk. The HDD is detected, and the chkdsk gets to 75%, and then goes backwards to 50%, and then reboots a few seconds after that, makes it to the WinXP splash, crashes.

I have tried 2 other hard drives (IDE) with the same result. I have tried removing the DVD-RW altogether. I have had it down to 1 stick of RAM, motherboard, HD, graphics card (no onboard video) and PSU.

Still the same results.

Anyone have any ideas?

Run memtest86+ and check for errors.
The DVD drive should be master if it is the first or only device on the ribbon cable.

Tried to run Memtest86+? At what settings is you RAM set in your BIOS? Any overclock?

All those problems remind me of when I had a bad overclock with my old Athlon XP; it would run fine most of the time at FSB200, but sometimes it would crash, moreover, it would give Memtest errors only after a few hours. Setting the FSB to 199 solved it all.

Your MB is on the blacklist at MS. DO NOT install SP3 on that MB. I own two. It's XP/wSP2 or use Vista it is much, much better on there than XP. XP/wSP3 = system failure.

Just install Vista on that board. Period.

Simple Google search for problems related to installation of SP3. I spoke with MS using 'free' tech support offered in conjunction with SP3 problems. Install Vista is the conclusion.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Asu [...] tartPage=1

I should have ran memtest, but now I can't even get into an operating system to do it.

I have set everything in bios back to default, nothing is overclocked anymore, I even reset the cmos battery.

As far as MS SP3 blacklisting this board, this might be it. However, I don't have a few hundred bucks to throw down on Vista.

You can get memtest on many Linux LiveCDs or can even burn a bootable CD just with it.

If SP3 is you problem, just don't install it, stay with SP2 ...

I could definitely stick with SP2, if I could just get back into XP at all.

But will my computer even recognize a Linux-based bootable CD if I have only have windows on the HD? This may sound like a dumb question, but I have no clue about anything Linux..

Yes it will, LiveCDs are "bootable CD Linux", you just put them in the CD and boot from it bypassing windows completely. When finished, remove CD, reboot and you will be back in windows.

I'll try this as soon as I get home. *crosses fingers*