hi all,

Back in November I built my first rig.  It worked flawlessly until about June.  I haven't added or upgraded anything. The problem I'm having is with Start up. I POST just fine, but when I get to the windows splash screen it stays there indeffinately. It never loads into windows. It also freezes when I try to boot into SAFE mode. I have been experiencing frequent crashes as of late, so I backed up all my data on my storage drive, and decided to reinstall windows. That didn't work either. I boot from the CD and get into windows installation. When I tell it to continue to install windows, I get a message telling me there is no hard drive detected. I know the CD-ROM reads the disks, and I know that my comp recognizes the HHDs.  The last time I tried to load windows, I got the following error message:

machine_check_exception stop: 0x0000009c (0x00000004, 0x8054d5f0, 0xb2000000, 0x00070f0f)

I know that one of the things this error can be caused by is poor power either from the wall itself or the PSU. I live in an older house and the plugs are 2 prong not 3 prong, so I have to use an adapter to plug in my power strip. Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to include all the info I could.


I've been trying different things all day.  I took everything out of the case and set up only the essential components.  Still it doesn't recognize the Hard drives.  All 3 cannot be bad.  I do have Norton Ghost.  Pretty much the same thing here though.  The DVD-ROM loads the recovery console using the emergency boot disk, but freezes at the point where the program actually opens to recovery your files.  At this point, I don't mind losing anything, I just want it to work again.

please help
wanderica

Mobo: MSI K8N SLi platinum
Processor: AMD 4400+ X2
Video: 7800 GTX
HDD: 2 x 74 GB raptor (raid 0)
Seagate 180 GB 7200.9
PSU: PC P&C 510 SLi
DVD: NEC DVD + RW
Memory: OCZ platinum DDR 400Try taking it to a location where the power is not suspect for a test.   Thanks for the quick reply.  Guess I should have said, I was in the process of that when I posted.  Would have been an easy fix, but alas that was not the problem.  I'm almost ready to buy a Dell >.>
Here is what Microsoft says:

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=329284well, I suppose the next logical step is to buy and test a new power supply.  Any Ideas as to brand, TYPE, etc.?I have never had a problem with Antec or newegg.com  

What about downloading MEMTEST and TESTING each RAM chip for an hour or so, then all together for  a next step, BASED on MS info?

www.memtest86.com