P4P800 XP boot problems

[astronaut1]

Hey all,

I just put together this system. The system was running just fine yesterday, Then when I turned it on today, it would not boot to XP no matter what I did. It would always crash to blue screen where the message indicated that it was a hardware problem.

Here is what I have:

P4P800 BIOS revision 1.008 {just updated to try to fix the boot problem, did not help}

2XDDR 3200 Corsair 512MB

P4 2.8c


Anyhow I think that is all of the relavent information.

Basically this is what I have tried. I have gone into the bios and set everything to stock.

Updated the bios

Tried putting the memory into different slots, and also just running a single stick at a time.



Yesterday I was overclocking the CPU. I don't think I burned it out. On boot up the mobo still recognizes it. Also the memory is recognized and checked. During that day I was also playing BF1942 for hours without it crashing.

The blue screen error tends to make me think that its a DDR ram compatiblity issue. The other thing thats intersting is that when I set the bios to default settings, the RAM no longer reads as DDR 400Mhz running in linear mode... It just checks the RAM {counting through it}


Any help would be appriciated. Thank you

[cbuddha42]

probably want ram in dual channel mode and make sure ram timings are ok - if you can try so other memory

[astronaut1]

Thx for the response cbuddha. Last night I went through everything accept a different ram manufacture, and a different processor. I actually did finally get it working. It wasn't a hardware issure as all signs seemed to point to. It was in fact a corrupt OS.

I ended up reinstalling XP and it booted right up. The funny thing I noticed was that when I went to reinstall / recover the OS as a last ditch effort, the software didn't recognize the format of the partitions that previously had the OS installed and any of the partitions that had data on them. So I had to format both of those partitions again.

Has anyone run into a similar type problem with XP?

Also cBuddha, I'm not really familar with setting up DDR to run in dual channel mode, I just came from an SDRAM machine. I followed what the manual said, and put the two identical sticks in the correct memory slots to ensure that I could get dual channel mode running. Basically right now its says its running in Dual channel linear mode {post reports} I know when I have taken a stick of memory it says that its running in single mode. The linear mode designation has me a little confused. Although I have run Sandra and received some decent scores for memory bandwidth. 4100 mb/s well above all the other reference systems. I also have not seen an option in the bios that is specifically used to turn dual channel mode on. From what Sandra indicates it seems that it is in dual channel mode, but again, I'm not really familar with DDR and what it typically scores.

Oh yeah and when I had been overclocking the CPU up to 3.5GHz I was getting memory bandwidth scores around 4700+ mb/s. If I'm not mistaken the max theoretical bandwidth is 6400mb/s...

Let me know what you think? thx

Wes