upgrade graphics n drivers guys. you'll find your problems should vanish. half life 2 is too powerful for the onboard mobo graphics to handle and for some cards to handle. no need to go disabling ports etc
JANINE
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I have just spoken to one of my brothers who is a PCWorld engineer about this problem.
to run half life 2 you need to have a DVD rom drive installed which it sounds like you both have in your machines.
the one thing he did say though is if it carries on go for a total reformat of the hard drive(s) and reinstall windows.
in the case of the sata hard drive you will need to install their driver before reinstalling windows. it should come up PRESS F6 TO INSTALL SATA OR RAID DRIVER.
Hopefully this will clear the errors.:)
JANINE
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I've got exactly the error message, with the same parameter codes.
My board is an ASUS A8V Ami bios, VIA chipset AMD 64 3000+ - all brand new, and running the latest BIOS update, Antec Sonata case (that's new, I had been told the crashes were the power supply and I wanted quieter anyway.
The crashes have come after shorter and shorter periods, and I ma down to barebones computing. Disabled everything I can, including USB.
Still crashing.
I just reflashed the BIOS for the fourth time, and this time it has been stable for twenty minutes. Yippee.
I tried two different drives, tried reloading Windows on one of them but it couldn't get through the installation. Tried a different video card, changed the memory chips. Only thing I have't pulled out is the floppy.
Got full virus protection up to date (Symantec).
One thing that will crash it for sure at the moment is my usb stick. Not straight away, but as soon as I try and drag anything to it. Or before I do.
possibly the motherboard is malfunctioning. could be arguing IDE channels which can happen at any time. sorry to say but this means a new motherboard. arguing ide channels cannot be resolved any other way:D
JANINE
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Janine, Thanks. I worry that you are right about the mobo, the problems started when I installed the new motherboard and CPU. I have two IDE drives, both with a windows installation on them. Reformatting one of those and putting on a clean XP installation fixed it for a while (24hrs). Overnight, that is, unattended, the events viewer shows it decided to start a database, then shut it down because it was corrupt, and blue screened with the same error as before. Started again normal and stable, but when I tried a boot from the other drive, XP had a missing or corrupt 'hal.dll' file.
Given the relative success with the reformatted drive, I am going to do that again to both drives, and only install xp on one of them. Second choice might be to add a SATA.
If all that fails, then the mobo goes back. I haven't seen any posting about this mobo, but I notice most of the complaints about this error are using Asus boards. Oh, and I did flash the bios again with the latest.
why would you want to install xp on both drives anyway? there is just virtually no point in it. if you really want xp on both drives by all means go ahead and do it. you will have to find the hal.dll file on the xp installation cd and then import it onto the new installation. this is very very hard.
my reccomendation is that you operate both hard drives as 1 volume and partition them. you can have two operating systems running off 1 partitioned hard drive as long as they both use the same file system ideally.
reformat both drives and make them 1 continual volume.
did the event log viewer allow you to open the 'database'. i hate to say this but there may well be a virus although i seriously hope not.
good luck:D
JANINE
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869 posts since Mar 2005
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