Random crashes - Any suggestions?

[rhaenaan]

I'm getting a variety of Failed Assertion messages and crashes. Mostly around block_memory.h, but it does vary.

Windows XP SP3
Athlon X2 5000+
4GB RAM (tried with 2GB as well)
9600 GSO video
nForce 430 motherboard
(started with onboard sound and now using X-Fi Gamer Xtreme card)

Temperatures and voltages are all fine.
Running burnins in 3dMark show no problems
All other games run fine

I've tried the following:

Updated all drivers
-No impact

-Turned down all of the graphics settings
(No impact on frequency of crashes)

-Forced OpenGL and DirectX
(Crashes in OpenGL drop to the NeL window. Crashes in DirectX consistently take the whole OS down.)

Disabled all services, additional programs, etc. Ran with only a bare OS and essential services.
-No impact on crashes

Tried with all 16 combinations of the graphic debugging options (disable AGP, shaders, etc.)
-(No impact on frequency of crashes)

Disabled Sound
-Slightly reduced frequency of crashes, but didn't stop them. 1-2 minute between crashes to 3-4 minutes.

Disabled the sound hardware on the motherboard
-Greatly improved stability. Went from ~1 minute between crashes to 5-15 minutes between crashes
-Installed dedicated sound card and enabled sound. No impact on crashes. Stayed at 5-15 minutes in-beween.

Turned off DEP, Virtualization support, Microcode updates and everything else not essential to running the OS. Broke the RAID mirroring and removed all but a single drive.
-No impact

Replaced memory on the motherboard
-No impact on crashes

Turned the motherboard down to all "safe" settings (dropped memory and CPU clock, extremely conservative memory timings, high PCI latency, slightly raised voltages, etc.)
-No impact on crashes

Stripped out sound drivers (sound subsystem and hardware) from the OS.
-No impact on crashes

Increased Paging file size
-No impact on crashes

Reinstalled a second drive
Moved Paging file to a dedicated volume
Moved temp files to a dedicated volume
-No impact on crashes

Apart from a full OS reload and/or swapping motherboards, I've run out of ideas.

It's rock solid on the nForce 680i box right next to it.

Any suggestions?

[eriu3]

Updated all drivers
-No impact

have you tried using older driver versions?
is this a new comp build for you? or has nothing changed since you last played?

[eriu3]

http://www.memtest86.com/

could be a good way to go also

edit: sorry, didnt see that you had replaced memory

[khyle]

Reinstalled a second drive
Moved Paging file to a dedicated volume
Moved temp files to a dedicated volume
-No impact on crashes

Have you tried installing Ryzom to that second drive and starting it from there?

[rhaenaan]

have you tried using older driver versions?
is this a new comp build for you? or has nothing changed since you last played?

Yup. Went back about 18 months and no difference. I've found the problem which I'll post below.

[rhaenaan]

Well...in the "totally non-intuitive" department, it appears to be an issue with my IDE hardware or drivers. I did try running Ryzom from the second physical drive and from the primary and there wasn't a difference.

However, I decided to upgrade to a new SATA drive, since I was going to reinstall windows from scratch anyways. I did a full reinstall, booted off of the SATA and ran Ryzom without a hitch.

I copied all of the old partitions over to the new drive (so that I could get rid of the old IDE drives. However, when I copied them, I accidentally enabled the old boot partition. It flailed around at startup because of the changes in drives and partitions. But on a whim, I fixed it up, booted it and everything ran fine!?!?! Ryzom was rock solid running with the exact OS, driver config, services, etc. from the old drive.

So I then stuck an IDE drive back in and copied the fresh windows partition over, did the volume fixups and booted it. Ryzom crashed as before.

Just to eliminate the specific physical drive as the issue, I copied it to another IDE drive. Same thing. Ryzom crashed.

On a related note, my CPU and Graphics benchmarks almost doubled with the IDE hardware disabled. That makes me think that it's some sort of interrupt handling or DMA issue. It was through sheer dumb luck that I swapped the drives, so I can't claim to have seen this as a possibility.

The only thing that I can tell you is that the machine ran Ryzom fine last year. Either I've had a hardware failure or XP3 or some other patch has nerfed my IDE compatibility. It's odd that Ryzom would be the only thing that crashes, but it's only the specific combination that seems to be the issue. It's running fine off the SATA drive now.

Problem solved

[rhaenaan]

http://www.memtest86.com/

could be a good way to go also

edit: sorry, didnt see that you had replaced memory

No worries. It was a good suggestion and one that I tried before swapping memory. It all came up clean. However, one thing that I've found is that memtest will identify actual bad memory, but a pass doesn't mean that it's not a memory issue. I had to learn that the hard way :/

Voltage drops from the drives and video card kicking in, timing issues, DMA incompatibilities, etc. don't come into play in memtest, so I still swap if I have spares around. It wasn't the memory, though