Problems With Computer

Hey -
I am having problems with my computer and would be very thankfull to any who could help me out.
Specs:
Soyo KA266-R Motherboard
Athlon 1.4 ghz
512 DDR
100mhz fsb
Onboard C-media soundchip
nVidia GeForce 2 64mb
20gb Seagate HD
40gb Seagate HD
Win 98

Problems:

When I hit shutdown my computer either restarts or just goes blank and computer does not turn off. The light on screen goes orange and I need to turn off powerstrip and wait fora bout three minutes before computer will boot again.

When booting, I recieve "Primary IDE no 80 conductor cable installed", and the same for secondary IDE. This started when I installed my second (the 40gb) HD last week. Computer still boots, but I am curious as to what the message means.

During certain games, such as Grand Theft Auto III, Alice, Morrowind, Serious Sam, and a few others the computer will completely freeze, repeating whatever sound it was making and will do nothing until I turn off power. Once again, sometimes it will reboot immediately and sometimes I must wait about three minutes.

Maybe the above seems like a lot to dump into chat all at once, but I have tried everything I know and am at a loss for what to do. If you have any ideas at all please post them.

Thank You

Is it a laptop or a desktop your running? Laptops with low power supply often have a hard time shuting themselves down. See unlike normal household objects PCs need to make sure everything is ok & that no programs are running and all before leting some of the power out.

If it's something different then you might need to have that checked out.

That means your hard drive supports UDMA.
If counted the number of wires on the IDE Ribbon cable currently connected to your motherboard you would have 40.

Newer drives can use the 80 wire cables.
Still 40 pins but 80 wires.

Get yourself an 80 pin Ribbon cable and install it.
Enable UDMA for your hard drive. It shouldnt matter but since your system is freezing you may want to get the correct cable and/or set your bios settings to match your hard drive specs.

i think u should reinstall your windows 98. but before that make sure all your cable plug tightly. face the problem once. and i just reinstall my windows and it work. hope it can help.

maybe win 98 disagrees with your system for some unknown reason, i had a similar problem with win 95 and an old cyrix that i now run 98SE and redhat on, if you are using the original '98 maybe you should try SE.

could also be your onboard hardware causing the trouble, although with those specs it seems unlikely, but its still a remote possibility, the comp that i was having trouble with strange as it seems has an unbuilt C-media chip too, maybe it could be an issue with the sound chip, but that still doesnt explain the unexpected shutdowns though

are you sure that the PC isn't running too hot? some new stuff shuts down automatically if it gets too hot and i know that AMD's run a bit hotter than others and they have the facility to detect the temp of teh CPu i think, that may be your problem, but these are just some suggestions

hope they are of some help

The 80 wire cable is the best place to start.. also with the Shutdown prob.. is it Win98se? If it is try the Shutdown patch.. se if that helps.. and only after checking out your IDE cable.. HAve had them faulty also..

Cheers

Primary IDE no 80 conductor cable installed",

are you using a old ATA66 cable?? i got that when i connected a HDD with an old cable to a new mobo

When I hit shutdown my computer either restarts or just goes blank and computer does not turn off. The light on screen goes orange and I need to turn off powerstrip and wait fora bout three minutes before computer will boot again

have you went into the bios, and looked at the power managment options?

Preep

How do I enable UDMA on my HD? Also, will my cd rom drives that are not set as slave to the two HD's work witht eh 80 wire cable?

thank everyone for the info so far, I will get some 80 wire cables soon and hope it works.

btw - the power down problem started happening randomly, i seem to remember it was after I updated bios. what settings (power) should I look at in the bios?

ack *typo

i meant that the cd driver ARE set as slaves to the hd's

http://support.microsoft.com/default...EN-US;Q239887&

Microsoft shutdown patch for win 98,

as far as the random freeze reboot during games, try your video card drivers...

What you can also check is see to it that your scanreg option is set to off in your system configuration utility.The reason why i say this is because of the fact that your pc does not shut down properly,you have to turn it off.What happens is when you restart with this option enabled, the registry will restore a backup copy which might be one where your previous configuration was in.

Hope this helps
regards
v/man:)

It looks like you have more than one problem. Checking what has been suggested here is a good idea.

However, is the 40 slave to the 20? If the 20 is DMA and the 40 is UDMA and you have UDMA enabled this could cause the startup error. Even if the 40 is UDMA and UDMA is enabled and you have a DMA cable the error could be occuring.

So, make sure you have the right cable. It is better to have the faster (normally newer) drive as the master. If your OS is on the 20 you might want to consider putting the 40 on as the master on the secondary IDE if it supports UDMA (many only support it on the primary).

Make sure to get the latest video card drivers. I use a geForce 2 32mb card and it is important not to use the drivers the manufacturer sent out. Get them directly from nVidia (in my opinion).

Read the other suggestions, put in the patch which might fix your shut down problem. One thing you didn't mention, did it ever shut down correctly. Does your motherboard and case support windows shutdown to power off? Most modern boards and cases do but not all.

Hope this gives you some hints (along with the othe excellent ones given here) to get you on your troubleshooting way.

I agree with the Windows 98 patch.

In regards to the cable error you're getting at boot all this is saying is that your new drive supports Ultra ATA. There should have been a new cable that came in the box with your drive that will eliminate that error. It won't cause you problems to NOT use it but your drive won't run at it's max speed. The new cables still have 40 pins so they will be compatible with your board but they have 80 wires. Check here for more information.

Thank you very much for all your ideas and help

Both of my IDE cables are 80 wire, 40 pin. I have gotten rid of the error now by putting both my hd's on IDE0 and both CD's on IDE1. Going to try the shutdown patch right after this post.

In answer to a question posted earlier here by SodaMoca5...my computer at one point did turn off when I hit shutdown. Also, I did download the latest drivers for my video card from the nVidia website.

I have discovered that my system has no problems with freezing if I turn off 3D hardware acceleration/rendering and set all acceleration/rendering to software. Where is the setting to do this to my video driver and have it affect all programs? The way I discovered this is that in one of my games (Unreal Tournament) you can specify hardware or software 3D rendering and it worked fine with software rendering but locked immediatly on loading with hardware rendering. Also, it only locks while playing games that are 3D (Morrowind, GTA3, Serious Sam, Alice). If anyone can tell me where to find the setting I would appreciate it.

Once again, thank you all for your help.

As silly as this may sound, sometimes the most obvious things are overlooked while we go deep looking for an answer. Just on the off chance you have the same problem i did....check for bad sectors on the hardrive running yer window app. ;)

After I hooked the two hd's on one hard drive and the cd's on the other the system ran extremely slow, so I hooked it up the old way, the message came back, but it boots fine. Downloading the shutdown patch fixed that problem, but my programs still freeze when I try to run them. I downloaded the most recent video and audio drivers, but that did not help at all. I did run NAV system checker and anti virus, there was a disk integrity problem on my game drive and I fixed it, and it is now that GTA3 wont even get past the load screen

-Thnx