Bad CPU?? Boot Problems and more! [SOLVED]

[blevo]

I just days ago got a new motherboard, processor and video card. After installing everything I booted up, thought the BIOS was setup alright and so went on. NTLDR missing. Adjusted the boot order and got that fixed, but before that I tried booting up a few live cds, Daryna Elyssa Puppy 4 and a few puplets. Everything would freeze up when it tried to load the kernal. The computer would restart if I ever got to windows (quick flash of the Blue Screen of Death).

I thought the problem was the connection to the motherboard that powers the cpu. I plugged in my 4 pin male into the 8 pin female on the motherboard so I figured this was the issue, the processor was halting the system when I tried to load up an operating system. Got a 4 to 8 pin adapter today though and I still have the same problem.

Actually I have more problems since I messed up my MBR with a debian install (I could boot into that cd) which isn't a big deal I can figure out how to fix that. And now a few IDE devices are not being recognized but I probably have the jumpers wrong I guess.

So my question, is this freezing when it tries to load the kernel and rebooting when I try to start windows (safe mode or not) a sign of a defective processor? Is that what the problem is?

mobo: jetway HA04 AM2
cpu: AMD Athlon 64 x 2 5000+
RAM: OCZ 4 GB

Thanks for any response guys.

Steve

## Update ##

After installing Debian and trying to boot up on that (I actually disconnected all but one HDD and one CD-ROM to simplify everything) I got all the hda : lost interrupt.

The Good News: I was able to get into Puppy 4.0 (NOP to be exact) by turning acpi off. Now I get to educate myself on acpi, what the benefits are and the disadvantages of not having it. So the new question is how do I boot into winXP with this problem? And what do I add to what file so Debian will boot (init something?) Then, if I want to get minty, can I start up the live cd with no "acpi" and install it so it will boot? I'll let you all know what happens next.

So I booted into Debian. Once. Now it's not working and I have no idea what I did or what changed.

[Husse]

The update is a bit confusing...
Go down to 2 GB memory - 4GB memory on a 32 bit system (non PAE) can have all sorts of funny side effects
Any 32 bit system can only address 4 GB in all of which the top 1 GB is reserved for the hardware and cant be used by anything else
And the Graphics cards memory is included in the limitation. I've seen reports that nvidia and Intel can get crazy with this.... (it's partly how the driver is written) For Athlon and dual memory channels you should not use 3GB
And if you are at all familiar with BIOS settings check them

[blevo]

I can see how it was confusing. It was like 4am.

As it stands right now I have Debian Etch bootable and working on a partition (IDE drive).
I can also boot into Puppy 4.0 (liveCD) with the parameter acpi=off
Unable to boot any other liveCD (i.e. Daryna, Elyssa). I'm assuming because of the acpi. If I try to turn off acpi completely in the BIOS the machine will plain not boot and I have to reset the CMOS.

So researching the bluescreen windows reboot problem (STOP: 0x0000007B blah, blah) I think I've found it's a driver issue I don't think it's corrupt Hard Disks since I can access those fine in Linux. I attempted to update the BIOS but found it was the latest version already.

Anyway I'll stop there since now it all seems to be a windowsXP problem and is beyond the scope of such a forum. Oh, I also tried using only 2GB RAM with no change. I'm still unable to boot the Live CDs however so that's a bummer.

I may just have to ditch Windows completely, but I'd rather not since I can't get complete features for everything since they're all made for Windows.

Thanks for the response Husse. And I'll probably come back and update you all if I ever get everything working.\

~Steve

[blevo]

Turns out it was just a (RAID/SATA) driver issue with the motherboard and windows. I was skeptical that this was the case because the drives in question were PATA/IDE, however on the motherboard this ATA deal goes through SATA or something (motherboards don't seem to Have 2 PATA anymore and that's how this one added the second).
So everything's working now. Well I'm not sure if I can boot up Mint but that's another issue for another post.

Steve