What's wrong?

[v|ru$]

Hi all:

i will introduce my computer system first:

AMD Athlon XP2400+
Abit KD7 VIA KT400
1 x Mushkin 512Mb DDR PC 3000
Windows XP Professional (no SP update)
80Gb Seagate 7200rpm ATA100

The computer is running extremely stable at 12.5 X 166 but i wanted to increase FSB to 200 so i lowered multiplier to 10 and upped FSB to 200 (i have also increased the voltage of ram to 2.85v but left the Vcore of CPU @ default).

Everything was going very well the first time (posted -> got into windows without any problem -> after running 3d mark for 2 hours). Now there is a problem. After running the benchmar, i restarted the computer, now i couldn't get into windows. An error message "windows\system file was corrupted. Please insert the Windows XP installation disc into CDROM and press 'r' to repair the problem".

Could someone please tell me what's been wrong? Is my seagate hd holding me back?

Thanx in advance.

[Binky Stunt Cat]

maybe you fried something.
alternativly, check your dividers are set to a lower value.
re-reading sources on overclocking would be a good idea as well, as i'm sure this would have been mentioned before.

[swiftynz]

basically what's happened is that your hdd has become corrupted. hard drives run off the pci bus which is designed to work at 33mhz. the KT400 chipset only supports pci dividers of 5 (166/5=33), 4 and 3 which means that the pci bus will be in spec at 166mhz, 133 mhz and 100 mhz.

from 100 - 132mhz it uses a divider of 3, 133-165 it uses 4 and 166 up it uses 5. the problem is that when you set the fsb to 200 mhz, you're still running a pci divider of 5 which gives a pci bus speed of 40mhz.

although this can work, it is still well out of spec and can cause hdd corruption such as you are experiencing. lowering the fsb to 166mhz or another fsb speed that keeps the pci bus below 37mhz (which in my experience is the maximum stable speed for hard drives) should stop hdd corruption from occuring.

hope this makes sense as it's 2.15am and i've just got back from a night on the booze...

[v|ru$]

thanx for sharing this. :)

it really helps.

[Ragnor]

Yup if you want to run at 200mhz and not risk trouble... you really need the 1/6 divider, so that the PCI and AGP are run in spec.

OR you want a motherboard that has fixed/independant AGP and PCI bus speeds like the Nforce2 boards or any modern Intel board.

I'm not sure if your motherboard (KT400 chipset) supports a 1/6 divider.. on VIA chipset boards there is usually option in bios called something like AGP/PCI/FSB clock with a value ratio value like 5:2:1

You ideally want a ratio value of 6:3:1

ie:
FSB = 200mhz,
PCI = FSB/6 = 33.33mhz
AGP = FSB/3 = 66.66mhz
Memory = FSB/1 = 200mhz

[Method]

From my experience wd's are quite fussy (the 800jb) If u run 175 ish or more i run the risk of hdd corruption which is not too much out of spec for the pci bus.

My maxtor handled that fsb pretty good tho.