Hardware help?

SkuLL

SkuLL

Chad McRealman
Orderite
I was hoping some talented PC fella might help me out here. I'm currently using a desktop PC while my laptop is in repair, and it is a few years old, but otherwise good. There I have THREE problems with it, which may all be related:

FIRST: Sometimes I get bluescreen of death (Windows XP), seemingly related to 'ati2cqag.dll', which happens more or less at random.

SECOND: My wireless doesn't work. (Have to use a USB flash modem, which is slow and gay).

THIRD: Some things are not recognised in the Device Manager, like so:
devicemanager.gif


The computer is quite old now and hasn't been used in a long time, so some drivers are ancient, while some are freshly updated. I have no clue what either of the things in Device Manager is, but I got a feeling that if I found the right drivers for all of them, all my problems would go away.

I know very little about hardware, and I don't remember what really is inside this PC, and I no longer have any CDs from the manufacturer. But I have the program Everest, so I can happily print out reports, if you tell me what you need to know.

Basic PC info (but can get you more detailed information via Everest):
System: Windows XP Professional
CPU: AMD Athlon 64, 2200 MHz 3500+
Motherboard: MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum (MS-7025)
Graphics card: ATI Radeon X800 XT Platinum

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated, as it's all a bit too much for me. I can fix the odd problem here and there by Googling, but there seems to be too much wrong with this one :)
 
At a guess;

1) Driver sweeper your graphics card and do a fresh driver install. That's an ATI DLL.
2) Not a clue, hard to troubleshoot without a bit more detail, but try reinstall drivers anyway. Make sure you have the login details for the wireless set up.
3) Those are missing drivers. Search your motherboard manufacturers website and see if you can hunt down the driver package.
 
I've already got the new ATI Catalyst drivers for the card, which is why I find it weird that 'ati2cqag.dll' is causing the BSODs.

So you're saying SM Bus Controler is a motherboard thing?

MutantScalper said:
OT but hope you still got warranty for that laptop.
Click to expand...
Nope, it's at an service authorised to repair that brand, but is long out of manufacturer warranty.
 
SkuLL said:
I've already got the new ATI Catalyst drivers for the card, which is why I find it weird that 'ati2cqag.dll' is causing the BSODs.
Click to expand...

Not as simple as simply installing the new ones. ATI say you don't need to sweep and reboot anymore, but until proven I'm remaining skeptical. Uninstall the card, then driver sweep the old drivers to remove remnants, then reinstall the new versions. Otherwise you can have left over files screwing with the new ones (Case in point, BSOD).


SkuLL said:
So you're saying SM Bus Controler is a motherboard thing?
Click to expand...

Yeah, just find the software bundle for your motherboard and it should sort it out.
 
Is this a brand-name PC?

In that case you should go to manufacturer webpage for your model and look for drivers there (all but the graphics driver). You can find out what type of device the driver is missing by doing some googling. I forgot how to read this info in XP but I believe you need to look up unknown device properties, under details. It should list manufacturer id/device id that can be used to identify the device itself. Updating the mobo bios would probably be a good idea.

Can't really tell much from screenshot, other than that you're missing some drivers. If you can run msinfo32 and then save the output to a file, upload it somewhere I can take a look in there.

To try and fix the bluescreen problem you should download the latest ATI drivers for sure. If that doesn't work out you could simply disable/delete the ati driver and use the default driver to keep the computer functional but with no fancy resolutions and hw acceleration to keep you going until you get your lappy back.

EDIT: What Aphyosis said, if most of your hardware devices are integrated in the motherboard (and they most likely are), installing the mobo driver bundle should sort you out.
 
Hm, it seems like ATI TV-card with missing drivers. (one from All-In-Wonder series, I presume)
Is any chance here to find what type of graphics card is in your computer? Don't you have original CD with drivers, or manual stashed somewhere? Can you look inside the case?
 
Make sure windows is updated to at least SP2 (I'm still fishy on SP3- but that is personal taste).

If your computer is a name brand (i.e. not custom built) then you should get a list of each item, and download the most up to date drivers for each piece of hardware from the individual manufacturer's website. Your wireless card is manufactured by a company, go to that company's website and using the model of the wifi card, find a driver for it. Remove any old driver from add/remove programs.

The advice about downloading updated motherboard drivers is right on- old, buggy drivers will tank your system.

About your BSOD / ati.dll- blue screens of death are, in one way or another, memory errors. They can be due to all kinds of things, bad driver installs, bad windows configs, but a frequently overlooked symptom is bad / improperly configured memory.

Check this page out: http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=proddesc&prod_no=587&maincat_no=1

Make sure if you're using 2 ram sticks (technically called DIMMs) that they're both the same make / model / capacity and in the right slots (i.e. channel 0 A / 1 A or 1 B / 2 B, etc, based on that link).

Update your bios using the tool / bios image from MSI's website.

When installing ATI's drivers, are you using the legacy driver set? the 800xt isn't supported any more, so you should be getting a driver package called legacy catalyst 10.3 or something. Also, if your card has TV capture functionality, make sure you're getting the right set of drivers off of ATI/AMD webpage (i.e. not just display but display + wdm + catalyst control center + all in wonder package). If, for some reason, you have both a tv capture card in addition to a video card in the system, I would remove the TV card if you aren't using it. This removes a possible source of problems.
 
Hey everyone, thanks for the tips!

I went to the MSI website, found my board and downloaded a pack of drivers. Working my way through them, the yellow question marks in Device Manager started disappearing.

However, with the BIOS update, the PC came to an error after restart - it goes fine up to the boot screen, after which it shows a light blue screen with the following message:

autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK

It hangs on that for a bit, then shows a proper BSOD with a short message at the top:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}

The Session Manager Initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x000003a (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down.

It comes back to that every time :sad: I have no disks or floppies from the manufacturer, just a Windows XP CD.

Any idea whatsoever? I wouldn't even mind doing a format of C: and installing XP again, but I don't know how to. I can get to BIOS setup fine and I can also get to the screen where I choose safe mode or normal start but the keyboard doesn't work on that screen (it does in BIOS).

I'm completely confused and slightly worried over this old piece of junk... Any help would be greatly appreciated.
 
SkuLL said:
Hey everyone, thanks for the tips!

I went to the MSI website, found my board and downloaded a pack of drivers. Working my way through them, the yellow question marks in Device Manager started disappearing.

However, with the BIOS update, the PC came to an error after restart - it goes fine up to the boot screen, after which it shows a light blue screen with the following message:

autochk program not found - skipping AUTOCHECK

It hangs on that for a bit, then shows a proper BSOD with a short message at the top:

STOP: c000021a {Fatal System Error}

The Session Manager Initialization system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0x000003a (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down.

It comes back to that every time :sad: I have no disks or floppies from the manufacturer, just a Windows XP CD.

Any idea whatsoever? I wouldn't even mind doing a format of C: and installing XP again, but I don't know how to. I can get to BIOS setup fine and I can also get to the screen where I choose safe mode or normal start but the keyboard doesn't work on that screen (it does in BIOS).
Click to expand...

Shouldn't be fiddling with the BIOS Unless you know what your doing and have a reason to do so. Your problems were software based, nothing that requires a BIOS flash. If you can get into the BIOS and the boot menu, you might be ok though.

Try repair the install by using the windows XP Disk.
 
Yeah, I didn't really think, just worked my way through the driver packs... :oops:

Dunno how to make it boot from the CD - it's set it as primary boot device, but when it came to Press any key to boot from CD . . . . . , nothing happened when I pressed a key and it tried to load Windows again and failed again.

Now, with every start, I get the screen where I can press [DEL] to enter BIOS setup, but this time nothing happens, the PC restarts itself immediately after that screen and goes back to the beginning, over and over again...

So now I can't even enter BIOS it seems :/

Is there anything I can do now, or should I just take it to a service, give them my Windows CD and ask them to wipe everything, get my Windows updated and stick on proper drivers?

EDIT: Thanks for helping, BTW. I know reading all the wrong shit I'm doing must make you hardware experts cringe :D
 
Shamelessly bumping - double posting:

I can get back to BIOS again. I can set the primary boot device to CD-ROM. But when it comes to pressing any key to boot from CD, the keyboard is non responsive and the option eventually gets skipped and the system boots from hard drive.

Any idea why the keyboard becomes non-responsive? Is it maybe because it's USB and not P/S2? But it works in BIOS... Confused. I'd be happy if I could wipe everything from C: drive and start over - anything I can do in BIOS to allow me to do this?

If I take it to a service, they will charge per hour, and we all know how long it takes to format and install Windows and download updates and install drivers.... :sad:
 
I'm hardly an expert troubleshooter, but since this problem started with a BIOS update, I doubt bothering with Windows is going to help you at the moment. In all likelyhood, something went wrong with that update. Didn't install properly, or perhaps you got the wrong version or something like that.

So what you need to do is double-check whether or not you got the correct version for you motherboard, (check the revision number on your motherboard, too, not just the type) Download the new Bios again, and run that somehow. Probably have to do that through a USB device or perhaps a floppy, if your PC still has that.

Alternatively, you can ask the service guys to just fix your BIOS?

-Gerko, hopefully helpful
 
Thanks, I think that will have to be the case - since I know nothing about BIOS setup, I'll probably just take it to the service, ask them to update/fix my BIOS and do the rest (Windows, drivers) myself...

Geez, what a retard :sad:
 
Your desktop PC and my old one was very similar, and I had an X800 Pro card, wich started going haywire with ati2dvag.dll errors and BSODs, the only thing I could do to get it to work properly for a while was to disable the "secondary" part of the graphics card, reinstall an older Catalyst.

Remember that the X800 series has been ditched from newer catalyst driver packs due to its age.

About the boot-thing, do you have an old PS/2 keyboard anywhere to plug in for the bootup?

Alternatively, if you've got a floppy drive, find an Win 98 bootdisk?
 
Gerko said:
I'm hardly an expert troubleshooter, but since this problem started with a BIOS update, I doubt bothering with Windows is going to help you at the moment. In all likelyhood, something went wrong with that update. Didn't install properly, or perhaps you got the wrong version or something like that.

So what you need to do is double-check whether or not you got the correct version for you motherboard, (check the revision number on your motherboard, too, not just the type) Download the new Bios again, and run that somehow. Probably have to do that through a USB device or perhaps a floppy, if your PC still has that.

Alternatively, you can ask the service guys to just fix your BIOS?
Click to expand...

Aye, after reading your recent post's i'm inclined to agree with this. The BIOS is a touchy thing that can cause some real problems if you fuck with it without knowing what your doing. I'd recommend letting a professional mess with it now. Sounds like a bad flash. Of course, like all things technical, diagnosing from a distance is significantly more difficult.

You could try reset the BIOS with jumpers, but if the update IS the fault, that may not help and at this stage you might be in a bit over your head =p

SKULL said:
EDIT: Thanks for helping, BTW. I know reading all the wrong shit I'm doing must make you hardware experts cringe Very Happy
Click to expand...

The golden rule is if your unsure, don't play with it. Stuff like BIOS Chips and jumpers should be left to proper techs because you can brick your board with the wrong settings.
 
Well thanks for the info, I'll see what can be done. Hopefully restoring BIOS won't take too long = not too expensive at a service.

later, I might need help picking the right drivers (once I get to re-installing Windows).
 
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