dying dell?

[trooper]

:confused:
Hi Guys n gals,

Here's the beat.

Dell Dimension XPS T 450 PIII

A few months ago my system started to turn itself on and off after 3 years of reliable service. The only changes over the years; new hard drive and another stick of 128mb RAM over a year ago.

January this year my system started shutting itself down and then went totally dead. I tried taking everything out and rebooting with the basics. No luck. The power supply checked out good.

After shorting out the "power good" signal, the board powered up and ran great. So i left it shorted and ran the system from my power strip.

A few days ago after not starting up for about 2 months I turned on the strip and nothing happened. I mean the system fans came on and all but no boot. I checked the power supply and tried again and it started. But when I selected shutdown it shutdown power completely before I could turn the strip off.

I took off the jumper and booted up normally and lo and behold it started as if it were new. This lasted for a day the after shutting down and trying to boot up I got a messsage saying:

WINDOWS PROTECTION ERROR. YOU NEED TO RESTART YOUR COMPUTER.


I tried starting in Win 98 and 2000 pro. Same message.

I put in a fresh Hd and tried a fresh install.

Win98- Standard Mode: Fault outside of ms-dos extender
EC=0000 CS=03DF IP=74DO AX=9A50 BX=03DF CX=FF98 DX03DF SI=2ABA DI=9A50

BP=OFB0 OS=03E7 ES=03D7 SS=027F SP=0F94


Win2k Pro- The file dmio.sys is corrupted.


Is my board toast? And if it is, which mobo could I buy that would let me use my 450 chip and sdRam for the time being until I can save up enough moolah to buy a decent 2gig chip and some ddr using the same board.

Just asking. Any ideas?
:( :(

[Uranium-235]

maybe fried your board. maybe killed your hard drive. hmm dang

[Aoshi]

yeah sounds like your mobo is a gonner. Although i had a friend who had a dell computer and they said his processor and his HD was bad. But i plugged his hd into a different ocmputer before he sent it in for repairs and it worked on others, jsut not on his. coudl be the same kind of problem for you, odd problem though.

[eviltechie]

one way to test out if components fail is to keep switching to find out what is good and what is false

so i guess its time to call your buddies and tell them to open their computer cases for you ;)

[byteguy]

Problem with a new mobo is that it most probably won't fit in a Dell case. So, guess you better look around for a new case for your stuff.

Art

[trooper]

:cry:
no... no.... noooo....

please, please ....

hope from somewhere... somebody?.... anybody?.....

:shake:

[T-shirt]

I think those are memory system errors. Could be the chipset/or other MB are dead, but try one stick of memory at a time.

[MrJekyll]

sounds like MB to me :lol: they don't last forever you know.

[trooper]

Now this is nuts! I was just fooling around , resigned to the fact of dead mobo. When I decided to try an old stick of mem.
WHAMMO!!

I'm online with my "dead" machine. Right now I'm too scared to shut down or even try anything else. I'll just enjoy tonite. Tomorrow, I start putting the other boards back in.

Could a bad memory stick wipe out other memory and totally stall a system like that?

Wazzup with that. I need your expert opines here and thanks for thge support (and consoling) so far.

[eviltechie]

who knows...

it could be the memory...

[vee_ess]

Not too surpirsing to be a stick of memory. The memory could easily do that because Windows is very sensitive to memory settings, like whether not you have a memory hole, etc. Now if you have had your system off for so long, then your BIOS options may have reset due to the CMOS battery running out of power. That would place the settings at their defaults and if that is not how it was intended to be whn built, problems will arise. I believe that is most likely what happened, so I wouldn't toss the memory just yet.

[eviltechie]

one way to check if the battery is ded and bios resets is to see if the system time has been reseted also

[T-shirt]

I think those are memory system errors. Could be the chipset/or other MB are dead, but try one stick of memory at a time.
Well, first you gotta pay the $79.95 diagnostic fee, for the above service. ;) (I know the check's in the mail :P )
DMIO.sys is one of to partition manager files in 2k
and the MS-dos extender is a fault hander for win98 the causes of the warning you receive are

Bad Fault in MS-DOS Extender
This error message occurs when the fault handler dispatcher in DOSX.EXE generates another cascaded fault while trying to handle a protected-mode exception. This error is usually caused by one of the following factors:

HIMEM.SYS is unable to control the A20 line.
DOS=HIGH is not functioning properly (related to HIMEM.SYS control).
The RAM, static RAM (SRAM), single in-line memory module (SIMM), or dynamic RAM (DRAM) chips are not functioning properly.
You are running DR DOS.
The third-party memory manager is not configured correctly.
The EMM386.EXE NOEMS x=A000-EFFF line is missing from the Config.sys file.
You have an old, out-of-date ROM BIOS.
Your CMOS settings are incorrect.
Your Windows files are old or corrupted. To test this, create a new directory on the hard drive, and install Windows in that directory.
Your disks are corrupted.
Your system is infected with the Form, Forms, Noint, or Yankee Doodle virus.

so it looks like virus check (not likely on a fresh format)
checking the bios settings
running Chkdisk
the config files
and swapping the various sticks of ram (first one at a time, then pairs, to determine which has the problem) (any good,trustworthy electronics store can test it for you, generally for a fee.but it's not worth putting more than a couple dollars in this whole thing)
while I still vote for the ram as the fault it could be corrosion in the ram, or cpu socket, a cracked trace on the MB which is intermitently bad at certain temps, some other minor componant on the MB failing (resistor, capacitor, etc)
dust bunnys
even if it seems to work after a little testing, it's time to plan for a new computer as it's only a matter of time before it strokes out permanetly.

[dann]

i have the same problem only thing is i can switch to a different hd and it will start up fine i dont think anyone really know what this means i am stumped its not my memory the board is brand new the other hd was working fine before i formatted im confused :confused:

[Marine]

my dad ordered a brand spakin new system from barebones and it wold freeze on install of any OS.turned out to be the memory so we tried a new memory stick and ureka it works. So i'm really not surprised it is working now.congrats man.

[Grinnin Reaper]

Stranges thing I saw with not booting was a busted IDE cable. You could boot to floopy or cd and then access the hard drive. You could not do a boot from the harddrive at random intervals. Mess with the cable and it would boot fine. Strangest thing I've ever saw. But i guess for diffrent opeations it uses diffrent strands of the ide cable. I know it's a screwball thing to check but it doesn't hurt to swap them out when your having odd hd problems.

[judeardaniel]

it is a hard time to find a solution of a problem, especially this fault on outside of ms-dos extender. thanks for all the suggestions. I tried pulling out the memory one by one and I found out it is the problem. thanks god I have done! my pc work again.

Re. Win2k Pro- The file dmio.sys is corrupted


Gentlemen, this is a nasty little error, and there is very little info on it on the net.

I have a very high-end box that has been working flat out for sometimes 18 hrs/day, and I mean being muti-tasked by a power-user ( not me !) It performed faultlessly – never once stumbling. However, it was shut down for 2 weeks, and 5 mins after start-up it closed itself down without warning. Needless to say we suspected a virus/Trojan despite the updates firewalls and virus detection engines. Every possible solutions was attempted over the next 6 hours –including attempting a reinstall and ghost image restoring – all unsuccessfully. We simple could not access the primary hard disk, or load any op.system from DOS to XP-Pro.

Then I read your bulletin board, took 2 mins to open the box and remount all the memory chips – and presto, all is back to normal. Thanks for stimulating the answer.

I was on the point of swapping both hard disks etc into a backup pc. However, I can’t wait for Monday to buy an external DVD writer, as being potentially deprived of massive amounts of data, despite a redundant HD and 2 gig zip backups was quite a shock.

Regards and thanks

Martin

[garwhite]

I had the same error message, when just starting a clean installation of Win98. Reseated the RAM and the problem went away.