Advice on a 64bit system upgrade

[Dave-H]

Thanks again guys, and sorry jaclaz I must come across as really stupid at times.

I guess I just couldn't understand why this system is treating the disks differently to the old system, but the systems are physically very different of course.

It just wasn't something I was expecting.

I'm now using Drive Assigner to put it right and I won't look at what fdisk says again I promise!

 

I've checked and tried every BIOS setting I can think of that could possibly be relevant, and Windows XP still restarts after shutdown.

It doesn't happen after I shut down Windows 98.

Whether that exonerates the BIOS I don't know, but I'm tempted to think that it might.

I can't find any other relevant settings in the Windows XP Device Manager.

What I don't understand is that it only started doing this in the last few days, it didn't start doing it as soon as I changed the motherboard.

If only I could remember what the last change I made was before I noticed it had started doing it!

[dencorso]

I've checked and tried every BIOS setting I can think of that could possibly be relevant, and Windows XP still restarts after shutdown.

It doesn't happen after I shut down Windows 98.

Whether that exonerates the BIOS I don't know, but I'm tempted to think that it might.

 

Yes. It sure does. It's not in the BIOS configuration or it would affect both 98 and XP.

 

That's really good news. Did you disable the double onboard GLAN using the motherboard jumper (I seem to remember you've mentioned it)? Did you restart XP in safe mode and remove all those non functioning drivers for it? That's the 1st step, now.

[jaclaz]

I don't know.

I mean it is still possible that some XP driver (or service or component or *whatever*) "hooks" *something* on the BIOS that the corresponding 9x driver/component simply ignores or bypasses.

 

Right now I cannot think of anything "simple" to troubleshoot the issue , see:

http://www.rarst.net/software/windows-shutdown-problems/

 

 

jaclaz

[dencorso]

While I'm the resident pessimist, I think you're being too pessimistic, jaclaz!

Remember: (I) Dave has a true backup of the XP system. (II) His XP initially wasn't exhibiting this odd behavior.

So, if push comes to shove, it's just a matter of redeploying the backup and starting again from scratch (= the state of the previous machine). That's why I'm being quite optmistic, up to this point.

[jaclaz]

I am not at all a pessimist .

 

I am very realist (at least based on my experience), what it is likely to happen (or at least what would happen to me ) is that I would be so p***ed off by this stupid behaviour that after restoring the backup (thus needing to re-load all new drivers and re-do all the changes/tune-ups done till now) after a few hours I would unknowingly re-do ALSO the *whatever* tweak/install actually caused this stupid shutdown issue and I would be back exactly in the same situation (not knowing what the heck causes the problem AND having again the same problem).

 

Even if this doesn't happen (because I missed re-doing the whatever causes this) the system won't work correctly if not for a few days, because before or later I will re-do (unknowingly) the whatever causes this (and of course by the time I will do a shutdown I will have completely forgotten what was it).

 

It would be much better to find out the actual reason, only I have no idea how to find it "quickly" (the "standard" procedure is described in the article I mentioned, but it is a lengthy one ).

 

And now, for NO apparent reason:

 

jaclaz

 

 

[dencorso]

Usually, the best way is to repeat the installation while using this:

[Dave-H]

Thanks again, going back to square one is not a solution I'm particularly enthusiastic about!

I did disable one of the GLANs on the motherboard jumpers, as I'm never going to need both of them.

I left the other one enabled as I did find an apparently working driver for it, even though I've not managed to get it to actually connect to anything yet!

I will try uninstalling that driver, just in case it's causing the restart problem.

 

The thing that really puzzles me is that it's not restarting as it would if you actually told it to restart.

It's completely shutting down, power off and everything, and then restarting after quite a long delay, as I said sometimes up to ten seconds, just as if I'd pushed the power button again. If I immediately shut it down again with the power button, it then stay off.

 

I think the GLANs are one of the few things that are still "live" when the system is shut down, so they have to be prime suspects I would have thought.

 

EDIT: Fixed it!

To cut a long story short, it turned out to be the PCI Ethernet card all along.

I took it out as a test, and the problem went away. Put it back and the problem came back, but only when the Ethernet cable was actually connected. I then realised that the card was still "live" even when the system was supposedly shut down, it still had lights flashing on it and was talking to my router.

This led me to its configuration options, and lo and behold, I found an option called "wake on shutdown" which was set to "yes".

Setting it to "no" has fixed the problem completely, and the card is no longer active when the system is "off".

What is puzzling me is why did this not happen before, as "on" is the default setting for the "wake from shutdown" option, so it must have always been like that until now. Very strange, but at least it's finally fixed!

 

I have now decided to give up on the on-board GLANs, and I've uninstalled the driver and disabled them both.

As I said before I'll have to use the PCI card on Windows 98 so I can't dispense with it anyway.

 

I don't know if I'll ever find out why the on-board GLANs wouldn't work, even after apparently finding a good driver.

The board's previous owner obviously had a problem with them too and disabled them.

 

It's very strange that Supermicro said that they couldn't understand why they wouldn't work with (or indeed be even recognised by) the supplied driver. They never came back to me as to whether the hardware ID I gave them is the one they would expect.

 

I now strongly suspect that there is a hardware fault, or the GLAN controller chip software has become corrupted, which is resulting in them reporting the wrong ID, if that can indeed happen! There should be lights on the Ethernet sockets too, to indicate activity and connection speed. I have never seen any light working on either socket ever, not even a flash on startup, which also to me indicates a major failure somewhere. As I said, I can live without them anyway!

 

Now I'll be posting later about my next problem...........

Edited August 15, 2014 by Dave-H

[dencorso]

Great it's fixed!

I was betting on a LAN related PME (= Power Management Event) from the start, because most of the recent action was around LAN drivers, but I confess the add-on LAN card was a bit of a surprise...  the "wake on shutdown" was set on the card (via a jumper) or through a BIOS interface? In any case, jaclaz was right! It was hardware after all, and yet, 98 and XP behaved differently on face of it. And hence, that means the hinges of reality remain intact: terrible things use to happen when jaclaz happens to be wrong!

[Dave-H]

I won't ask what happens in the event of the I'm sure extremely rare occurrence of jaclaz being proved wrong!

Perhaps best not to know!

 

It was a setting on the advanced tab of the card's entry in Device Manager. There are no jumpers on the card.

There's also an entry called "Wake-Up Capabilities" which has the options "Link Change", "Magic packet", "Magic Packet & Packet Match", "None", and "Packet Match". It's set to "Magic Packet & Packet Match", which I haven't changed.

I'm just annoyed with myself that I didn't check all those settings before, I only looked at the Power Management options!

 

Anyway, my next problem (!) relates to the issues I mentioned earlier with the Adobe programs.

Occasionally when it crashes, a Windows error box pops up saying that GDI+ has encountered an error and needs to close, and I've noticed now freezes and errors on some Explorer windows when I open them. The error is always stated as being in gdi.dll.

Is this something I should have updated perhaps for the new system, if indeed you can?

I never had these problems with the old system, but it is a completely different graphics card now apart from anything else.

I'm using the drivers which came with it, and there is bound to be a later version now.

Is this likely to be graphics driver related, and even if it isn't should I update anyway?

My research on this so far is inconclusive.

[jaclaz]

I won't ask what happens in the event of the I'm sure extremely rare occurrence of jaclaz being proved wrong!

Perhaps best not to know!

Usually nothing particularly happens , though in a few cases, as a side effect, a division by zero occurrred.

http://dividebyzero.it/

 

jaclaz

[dencorso]

You used to have an nVidia GeForce 7950GT AGP on the X5DAE. You didn't tell us much about your new graphics card, apart from "it is a completely different graphics card now" (and it ought to be so, since the X7DAL-E cannot accept an AGP card for lack of a proper connector for it)... what's it? Is it another nVidia card? And what drivers are you using right now? After we know that, we may decide about upgrading graphics drivers or not.

[Dave-H]

The new card is another ATI/AMD Radeon based card, an Asus EAH5450, based on Radeon HD5450.

I'm using the driver that came with it, the 2D driver version 6.14.10.7279.

The Catalyst version doesn't seem to be actually quoted anywhere any more.

 

I've now been noticing what may well be other symptoms of the same problem.

When I open a video in the QuickTime player, the player always loads onto the screen OK, but if I try to play the video file or move the window, it immediately shuts down! Trying again always seems to then work OK.

Also my e-mail program (Eudora 7) which has never had any problems in the past is occasionally now crashing when I try to open a message, with "Eudora.exe caused fault #c0000005 in gdiplus.dll".

Something is definitely not happy!

 

I should add that my graphics settings, resolution, colour depth, and refresh rate, are all exactly the same as they were before the upgrade.

 

EDIT:

Well, touching wood, I think it may now be OK!

I uninstalled the graphics driver, and this time did a rather more thorough system cleaning job than I did the first time, and installed the latest version from AMD. I was surprised to find that the latest version offered by Asus on their site was older than the version on the CD that came with the board! The latest version on the AMD site is actually the same driver version as on the CD, but the Catalyst Control Center and HDMI Audio driver is newer. It's now identified as Catalyst 14.4.

The Adobe programs now load OK, and I'm keeping an eye out for any other problems, but hopefully it's now sorted.

Edited August 17, 2014 by Dave-H

[Dave-H]

Hi again, sorry it's been a while.

I've been trying to find why one of my hard drives, which is in an external enclosure, wasn't making a good data connection with the motherboard.

To cut a long story short, it looks as if there's a hardware problem in the enclosure, so nothing to do with the board thank goodness!

 

I tried running the system with the cover on for the first time, and was horrified to find that almost immediately the fans running at double their usual speed.

It sounded like it was going to take off. It was quite frightening and sounded like there was going to be physical damage if I didn't switch it off quick!

I've ordered a couple of new fans, which are four pin ones that should talk to the motherboard properly. The processor heatsinks already have that, but the two old fans were only three pin.

 

I hope they do the trick to keep it cool enough. I'm still getting overheats sometimes but only ever on the PCEI Agent 1 monitor.

PECI Agent 2 is always showing low, which is rather strange. PECI 1 is low unless I ask the system to do any real work, at which point it goes to medium, and occasionally to high which triggers the alarm. I found also that when the system's working hard the RAM chips become incredibly hot, you can't touch them, is that normal?!

 

I don't really understand the low/medium/high PECI system, I will need to do more research on it.

I much preferred the system on the old board that just told you exactly what actual temperature the processors were running at!

[dencorso]

Dave? Are you there? Do please give us an update... are things OK, now?

 

I'm aware you've already bought new fans, but, just for the record (or in case you still need this info): for the case I do recommend Gelid or Noctua fans, but or processor-heatsink/fan assemblies, I prefer Zalman, although their products are rather bulky, so perhaps Gelid or Noctua solutions might be a better choice in your specific case, too. They cost more, but they are worth every cent they cost, IMO.

[Dave-H]

Sorry it's been such a long time since I last posted, but I waited over a week for the fans I ordered online to arrive, and when I rang the company to ask where there were, they told me they couldn't get them from their supplier until they had a minimum number to order, which could take several more weeks! I was not amused, as they were supposed to be in stock, so I cancelled the order and went elsewhere! I only got the fans yesterday, and they are Noctua PWM ones which seem very good.

 

Unfortunately there are still problems, with the PECI Agent 1 constantly showing overheating in the first processor if it's asked to do any real work, even though Agent 2 almost never says anything other than "low". The only time I got it to say anything else was when I disabled the Processor 2 heatsink fan as a test, and then it did change, which at least proved it was working!

 

So, I can't understand why the first processor would be apparently heating up much more than the second one. I have swapped the processors themselves, and the heatsinks, but the problem is always on processor 1.

I think the high readings are wrong, because things don't appear to be that hot at all, and I'm just hoping that it's not a faulty sensor on the motherboard, as I think that will be difficult if not impossible to fix.

 

I am away from home at the moment, back on Tuesday, so I will report more then.

Cheers, Dave.