Larry,

I hate to hear stories like yours. You just spent your hard earned money on a bunch of new stuff that you carefully researched, put it all together... and it's a HUGE let down when it doesn't work. Many of us have seen and appreciate your many posts of advice and experience over the years, and will gladly jump in and help. The good news in all this is that you've got a LOT of experienced users here in this forum... and I can see that you're getting some good advice. I'd like to contribute as well...

1. On more than one occasion in the past, I've encountered similar troubles with no good explanation. Then, after physically reconnecting every single cable and reseating every card and the CPU... presto... eveything is OK. It will take a little of your time, but worth the effort.

2. I concur along with the rest of the group that the issue you're describing could easily be memory related. Please double check the compatibility of the memory to the motherboard, and confirm correct BIOS settings. If you have more than 1 stick of RAM, installing and testing them 1 at a time is also prudent. Memtest, Sandra... good choices for this.

3. Oh, before I go any further, I DO hope you're working with a fresh Windows installation... transferring a hard drive with an installed OS from one motherboard to another is a recipe for disaster.

4. Again, on numerous occasions in my former life as a PC repair instructor, I traced otherwise unknown causes of random crashes to a functioning but ultimately unstable power supply. I cannot stress enough the importance of a solid and reliable power supply. Seasonic (and Corsair) are at the top of that list. So, if you have another power supply on hand, it's worth a swap out to test if you've exhausted other possible causes.

5. You mentioned crashes every 5 minutes or so. Check your CPU temp in BIOS to ensure it is not overheating and shutting down. Sometimes its as easy as forgetting to plug in the CPU fan lead. Or, the CPU heatsink may not be making a good solid contact with the CPU. Quality (and not too much) thermal grease such as Arctic Silver 5 or the new Zalman thermal compound are excellent choices here.

Hope this helps... I'd need more specific system specs (model #'s, etc.) for further advice.

hounDAWg

ORIGINAL: Staccato

ORIGINAL: mr. moon

Wow...

I must be on everyone's ignore list...



Oh well, good luck anyways.

-mr moon

No, Moon, you're just overshadowed by CW's very selective responses to trouble here. I think the nose needs to be a certain shade of toffee to warrant a response.

Oh no not again....sigh

Let's see, where have I heard this before?....hmmm

another good idea is to check your system and application logs to see if anything pops up. it can be tedious to go through and look at each event as words and as bytes or hwatever the options are. But I have tracked down more than one offending app that way.
Another good one is to make sure your IRQs are all straight and that everything is happy with its drivers.
Good luck!
I feel your pain!

I can't help at all, Larry, but I hope things work out for you. You're lucky to have pretty good computer skills,,, imagine what a total disaster this would be for a computer lamer like me. cheers buddy

Addressing the SATA drives wasn't an issue for me. Everything installed and partitioned like normal. I installed WinXP Pro (SP2) on my primary partition (for Sonar and recording) and WinXP (SP1) Home on a second partition (for internet surfing and general office work).

I was worried about that at first too but nothing bad to report there. It all worked just like a regular IDE drive. Plug it in, load windows, do your partitioning and away you go. I hope you have the same success. I didn't have to load any external drivers or anything. The one thing that should have caused a headache, didn't

Here's an update:

I played around a bit with memory timing and all that. Didn't make a difference. As a last resort I decided to reinstall Sonar 6 and it seems to have improved the situation. This was originally a fresh install. My confidence isn't 100% yet but it hasn't crashed yet after about 15 minutes of serious testing. Prior to this I could make it crash after 2 or 3 minutes. I could make the problem appear by simply arming tracks for recording. I have, in some of my projects, grouped maybe 8-10 tracks for recording. Arming and unarming tracks would usually always cause a crash. I didn't even have to record any audio. I still notice that when arming multiple tracks like that, they arm slowly and randomly - not simultaneously like in previous versions. That bug has not been fixed in V6.

Anyway, this was a positive step. It could be that I had an unfriendly VST plug-in. I haven't installed the 6.2 update yet. That might have a bearing too. btw - are we supposed to install the 6.0.1 update before installing 6.2? That's how I did it originally. I wasn't sure if that might have had a bearing on this or not. I also increased my picture cache to 1000MB (it was originally set to 500MB) and removed whatever was in there from before.

Well, I'm going to risk it and run some sessions today and see what happens. If I get a BSOD I'll make note of the error codes and whatnot and report back. Again - thanks guys for your help! I'd buy ya all brewskis if you were here

Thanks - maybe that will make a difference.

ORIGINAL: mr. moon
Start troubleshooting by checking all cables & connectors (including memory seating), system temps of CPU and MB, and resetting the BIOS to default/non-aggressive settings appropriate for your components, and then by running the following test utilities, in the following order (each for several hours or until the errors start):

1. Memtest86 v3.2 (link)

Note that that version hasn't been updated since 2004. A newer version is at Memtest86+

Hi Kriz,


I know I'm harping on this...
But you can purchase the best RAM and Motherboard that money can buy... and that's still no guarantee that they're 100% compatible. Sure... for many tasks (especially those less RAM intensive), the system could very well appear to be working great.

FWIW, I've built a heck of a lot of DAWs... and I'd almost guarantee that the situation is RAM (either bad stick or compatibility) related. Motherboard would be a distant second culprit...

This situation is obviously causing a lot of grief.
I'd suggest going to a local computer super store... and picking up a different brand of RAM.
Pop that RAM into the system and run Memtest. If you don't receive any errors from Memtest, run the DAW with the new RAM for a couple of days. Worst case, (if there's no change) you'd have to return the new RAM for a refund. Best case, for a couple hundred bucks... your system is rock-solid.

ORIGINAL: eratu

With all due respect to Larry, I wonder if you're getting the message? The voices have turned into a chorus. Larry, you NEEEEED to run a heavy hitting session of memtest! Download an ISO from here: http://www.memtest.org/ then burn it onto a CD... then boot up with that CD and memtest will start running. Let it run overnight, minimally. 24-48 hours is even better. I ALWAYS do this now with every build I put together.

If memtest passes, then load up windows and run a heavy burn-in session of Sandra.... details have been given elsewhere on that I'm sure.

If you pass a heavy memtest and Sandra phase and are still getting weird crashes, then it is probably the power supply. Just some joe-consumer average 600W power supply won't cut it for a DAW (I'm not saying you bought one of those, but you didn't list your make and model in your specs). You need a workstation-level power supply. I use Seasonic and SilverStone. There are many other great ones.

Those three steps above have solved 95% of my strange crash problems on all the computers I've built.

While this is a must, the 1st step would be to adjust the BIOS settings to best accommodate the RAM. The RAM may be in perfect shape, but if the settings that control the interaction between the RAM and the rest of the system are off, it will 'appear' to be bad when running memtest or any stress testers (Sandra, etc.). Running these programs before adjusting the settings can lead to false positives/negatives.

ORIGINAL: tarsier

ORIGINAL: mr. moon
Start troubleshooting by checking all cables & connectors (including memory seating), system temps of CPU and MB, and resetting the BIOS to default/non-aggressive settings appropriate for your components, and then by running the following test utilities, in the following order (each for several hours or until the errors start):

1. Memtest86 v3.2 (link)

Note that that version hasn't been updated since 2004. A newer version is at Memtest86+

Huh, I guess you learn something new every day! Thanks for the link, tarsier! Perhaps you could email me a quick message to let me know how well this new version has worked for you, as I've not used it before, as I don't run DDR2 or anything like that.

Thanks!

-mr moon

Holy cow... talk about too much of a good thing... this forum is too damn smart for it's own good!

Cakewalk, consider making this thread a sticky... you know: the canonical "my system is unstable, please help!" thread. Lots of excellent suggestions in here for top-down trouble shooting... and the type of thread that pops up at least a few times per year.