strange crashing behaviour

[funkpunk]

Hi all. You may have seen my post over in hardware/software>Windows support. That post is now a day old.

I recently had a system failure that was diagnosed as a motherboard problem (my system basically became inert when I hit power, one morning). I just had a new, replacement P5B put in, and yesterday observed the following failure modes -- the system worked for short periods but eventually either: simply stopped updating the screen, and became unresponsive; or the screen would go black and cycle through its "no video input" routine. The black screen crashes occurred even in Safe Mode.

This evening I dug out an old, 40Gig IDE hard drive, connected it to my system and installed XP onto it (along the way I finally got to learn what that whole "cable select/master/slave" business is about). Installation went well, but the system is still unstable: I've already experience two black screen crashes, and 0x000000D1 Stop error, linked to usbport.sys.

Yesterday I did manage to run BurnInTest successfully a few times in safe mode (normal mode was much to unstable). No hardware errors were detected.

I believe I'll see if there are any p5B updates or a new BIOS. In the meantime, any comments/suggestions/advice/ guidance would be really appreciated.

Hardware specs (from yesterday, with my original SATA, not the new IDE drive)

Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3 build 2600 (32-bit),

1 x Intel® Core™2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz [1540.4 MHz],

2.0GB RAM,

Sapphire RADEON X1600 PRO, Sapphire RADEON X1600 PRO Secondary,

233GB HDD,

DVD, DVD, DVD,

Motherboard Manufacturer: ASUSTeK Computer INC.

Motherboard Name: P5B

Motherboard Version: Rev 1.xx

BIOS Manufacturer: American Megatrends Inc.

BIOS Version: 1803

BIOS Release Date: 11/26/2007

CPU manufacturer: GenuineIntel

CPU Type: Intel® Core™2 CPU 6400 @ 2.13GHz

CPUID: Family 6, Model F, Stepping 6

Physical CPU's: 1

Cores per CPU: 2

Total Physical Memory: 2047MB

Available Physical Memory: 1416MB

Memory devices:

DIMM0:

- 1024MB, 800MHz,

DIMM1:

- Not populated

DIMM2:

- 1024MB, 800MHz,

DIMM3:

- Not populated

Virtual memory: C:\pagefile.sys (allocated base size 4046MB)

Sapphire RADEON X1600 PRO

Chip Type: ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x71C2)

DAC Type: Internal DAC(400MHz)

Memory: 256MB

BIOS: 11x-2C84S5SA-002

Driver provider: ATI Technologies Inc.

Driver version: 8.573.0.0

Driver date: 1-13-2009

Monitor 1: 1440x900x32 60Hz (Primary monitor)

Sapphire RADEON X1600 PRO Secondary

Chip Type: ATI Radeon Graphics Processor (0x71E2)

DAC Type: Internal DAC(400MHz)

Memory: 256MB

BIOS: 11x-2C84S5SA-002

Driver provider: ATI Technologies Inc.

Driver version: 8.573.0.0

Driver date: 1-13-2009

Realtek RTL8168/8111 PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC

[-pops-]

The first thing I would do is disconnect all items that are unnecessary for the machine to run so that you have just a basic system.

Ensure you have installed the motherboard drivers and graphics card software.

[funkpunk]

The first thing I would do is disconnect all items that are unnecessary for the machine to run so that you have just a basic system.

Ensure you have installed the motherboard drivers and graphics card software.

It's actually already a pretty minimal system, but I just yanked the wireless card (probably wouldn't have re-installed the drivers anyway -- we're using ethernet here) and pulled the optical driver's power connector out. It's also a clean and very minimal XP install, but one of the first things I did was put on the mobo and video card drivers. Last night I also reflashed the mobo ROM, and I just had another crash (black screen failure mode).

FP.