Hardware Analysis - IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Victor Genao — 2008-04-24T18:46:59-05:00

Well a year later and the problem persists....

So far i've tried everything from changing ram chips to testing them out 1 by 1, i haven't ran the memtest86 to check them out, but i dont think i need to since 2 of the ram chips i've been using, i've had for about 3-4 years and this Never happened before, Ever..... This started happening recently after i got some new ram and a new videocard (7300GT from BFG, AGP)

I'm starting to think this happens more and more with AGP users, (i'm on Intel not AMD),

the only thing i can see that may help me out is the sound card, i have a turtlebeach Riviera 5.1 soundcard that has always worked fine, but now after reading this i think it may be conflicting with something, I've had Bad Memory BSOD, PFN_Corrupt, and IRQL_NOT_LESS.... all of which pop up no matter how many/which ram chips i have in. I'm gonna try to remove the soundcard and try it that way, as i have had some of the BSOD specify the cmaudio.dll as the problem...

my setup: (post upgrade)

Intel Prescott 3.0
Ausus P4P800E-Deluxe (intel mobo)
2x 512mb ULTRA PC3200 DDR (my older ones that i never had a problem with)
2x 1024mb ULTRA PC3200 DDR ( i've tried using only 1 ram chip at a time, and each of these didn't give me any problems specifically, the same BSOD pops up no matter which ram chip i use)
BFG GeForce 7300GT 512 AGP
1x 200gig MAXTOR SATA HDD
1x 20gig generic hdd (which i currently have completely disconnected, still getting BSOD)
DVD-DL CD Burner (not sure which brand atm, but this has never given me problems and it works fine)....
Windows XP Pro SP2 with ALL updates up to Feb of 2008

what i've noticed is that i usually get the BSOD when i use something that uses either D3D or the sound drivers. so far i dont really have any problems with D3D as i can run some games for extended periods of time without any performance issues. I'm thinking in my specific case, its a soundcard issue with the PCI slot. i'll update this later on to confirm this.

and i believe that this thread can be safely stated to be alive for 4 years, (and going).

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Dick Hertz — 2007-01-10T19:38:20-05:00

I have WinXP/SP2. Had the same problem. The message contained "Stop 0x000000D1" and on bottom it said "Ndis.sys" by the address and one time it happened instead of "Ndis.sys" it said "Rtl_____" with #'s in the blancs. Well i went to this website http://www.vladd44.com/other/irq_error.php and instead of this,>>>1. Right click on the device in the list (see above) and then select properties. 2. Click the Resources tab. 3. Remove the tick from the Use automatic settings option. 4. Select a non-conflicting configuration from the pull down box. 5. Click OK"<<< I Right clicked on my Ethernet card and uninstalled drivers, restarted my system 2X and the default driver reinstalled itself on the second restart. Lemme know if this fix works for others as well.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

hakit hakit — 2006-12-08T10:42:45-05:00

Guys it is clear from the title IRQ - this is most commonly an IRQ error generated due to the sharing of IRQ addresses. yes it can happen from bad memory bust most of the time it is not. if you check the systeminfo and look under conflicks etc you can see the devices that have IRQ conflicks and sharing. in one msg i noticed someone said they removed the video card. yes most of the time it is due to video vard sharing or conflickting of the same IRQ with another device. simpley removing and plugging into another PCI can resolve his as it will release the IRQ and assign a new number.

thanks
and good luck
Hakan

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Rahul s — 2006-10-16T20:50:49-05:00

Yes....you were right...its a bad Memory. There are no BDOD errors and the winxp installation went very smoothly

Rahul

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Rizaldy Velasco — 2006-10-16T04:48:35-05:00

I Was able to finally find the Culprit. It was a bad RAM Or Bad Memory. I Replaced one of my RAM. And My PC Runs Smoothly up until now. and The BSOD is Gone. Try Replacing one of your RAM. one of them might have been Damage Already

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Rahul s — 2006-10-15T01:20:42-05:00

Hi Rizaldy,
I have been having a similar problem like urs. I have been using winxp pro sp2 since 2 years on my hdd, for some reasons I formatted my hdd. While doing a fresh install of WinXPpro SP2 it keeps stopping in between when the setup files are being installed to the Hdd, and each time it says that a certain file was unable to be copy. please check the Windows CD , or press Enter to retry and Esc to ignore the file. (Windows 98SE installs smoothly without any errors whatsoever).

When I ignore it, more and more files come up as "unable to read" and then suddenly that BSOD error msg " IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL". I have tried to install Win xp again and again and each time during the setup process it halts at different places randomly like 12%, 30% or 85%, 90%. First I thought that its a bad CD or CDRom (I also tried with diff installation disks, hdd and cd roms/rws), so I hooked the same cd-rom and Hdd to another PC and installed Win xp pro SP2 using the same CD and believe me it installed smoothly, without any errors or halts. This concluded that my hdd, cdrom, xp cd is alright.
Now I tried to install XP from an installation dump on the other partition of the hdd by booting from floppy and navigating to the xp dump on partition D:winxp/i386/winnt.exe , At first the files installed well till full 100% and when it restarted it gave that same error IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL. or DRIVER_IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL..This concluded that
there was a problem with my motherboard. I have still not checked my RAM for any errors till now..I took only the motherboard it to the repair center since it was still under warranty. The tech replaced a small chip on the board called "the bios", the chip in which the Bios is installed and the installation procedure went smoothly, but after restart when Win xp GUI interface starts where it shows a countdown of 39 miniutes, it says that a specific file was unable to read from the xpdisk. So another tech tried to install winxp from scratch and it gave the same BSOD error msg IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL after installing to a certain percentage.

After this he gave me an new board. I hooked the new board to my pc with the same hdd, RAM, CD rom and installed using the same CD... and believe me that same error message came back after a certain percentage of installation. Uptill now i havent done any thing with the RAM, but after reading all the 6 pages in this forum, i believe that my RAM is the culprit. I will replace the RAM today and try the installation again.

My Specs:
AMD Athlon 3000+
ASUS K8S-MX
1 x Hynix 256 DDR RAM
Onboard sound+video
Samsung cd-rom+cdrw
Seagate40 GB and 4.3 GB

rgds,
Rahul.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

jon bailey — 2006-09-23T14:42:52-05:00

ive had the problem before, and like above when the ram cooled back down, i put it back in and it worked fine, a friend of mine who owns a computer shop told me that he's had customers who have had the same problem, and he explains it as the ram chip expanding when hot.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Chuck Campbell — 2006-09-21T17:09:02-05:00

You shouldn't see any error message. I was getting the IRQ_NOT_Less.. error message, I reseated the RAM and then ran the Mem Test and I'm receiving 0 error messages.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

William Burnett — 2006-07-16T21:04:40-05:00

^^ I just got a new error PFN_LIST_CORRUPT

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

William Burnett — 2006-07-16T20:08:58-05:00

After reading about 3 pages of the stuff from '03 I realized that it might not be all that helpful. Alot of issues and answers seemed to adress the AGP slot, a slot I don't have.

System: built June '05 and never had a problem until now:
Windows XP home
ASUS K8N SLI Deluxe
AMD Venice 3000+
EVGA 7900GT KO (2 months old)
SB Audigy 2zs gamer
2 gigs Corsair Value Select
535w Enermax PS (2 months old)

This problem has been intermittent. It happened maybe once a month for the last 3 months and yes that means it happened before I swapped video cards and power supplies. My computer will boot into windows and crash, it will also often get into windows and be fine then crash on shutdown. Last night I merely let it sit for about 30minutes and it ran fine for about 2hrs up until bedtime. I shut it down and came back this morning to the blue screen of death. I actually just got into windows, uninstalled sound drivers, downloaded new ones rebooted and installed the new drivers.

I am now running memtest86 to see if it finds any problems and so far (don't really know what this means) I have 21,514 listed under the errors column and the number is growing.

So any new news for '06 on this problem or is it just the same 'ol same 'ol "YOUR SYSTEM IS EFFED" message?

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Michael Piersa — 2006-07-05T13:47:30-05:00

1. Try putting sound card in different PCI slot... there is some IRQ issue with the P4T533 series between AGP and one of the PCI slots.
2. Check temperature of your CPU if you are not running hot.
2. Try to lower or rais FSB in BIOS from 133 to 132 or 134. Again the P4T533 series doesnt really like to run of default 133. Been running for 4 years at 132 MHz FSB with no blue screen of death.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

DublinGunner — 2006-05-25T15:58:57-05:00

wow talk about thread resurgence!!!

The last post (before the new problem) was mid last year, and the thread started in 2002!!!!!

Could this be the longest living thread on HWA?

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

David Hitch-Potts — 2006-05-25T15:19:57-05:00

it's definatly the sound blaster i have a sound blaster live value and an bfg fx5500 and when i use the sound blaster with the digital out it gives me the blue screen of the death. it also happens with a radeon ve with 32mb vram and composite out s-video and vga out. but when i put the soundblaster in that doesnt have a digital out in it doesnt happen.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

lou andrew — 2006-05-16T16:40:02-05:00

i started having the same problems with a Dell 4600 that i'd owned for a year. i had moved across country and taken my pc with me. turns out it was a loose ram chip. i reseated both my ram boards, and the problem was fixed. i had found a website that recommended that i test my ram due to the above error message. i used a MS Beta ram tester and it found some errors. the recommended proceedure was to:
1. reseat all ram chips and retest
2. if still having problems, test one chip at a time until find problem chip
3. if still getting errors on all tests, try running ram test with known good chip.
4. if good chip produces no errors, replace all bad ram chips
5. if good chip produces errors, probably bad motherboard.

I only needed to reseat my chips and problem went away. i guess too much jarring during move. hope that helps, good luck.

Re: IRQ NOT LESS OR EQUAL, bad ram?

Johan tja — 2005-06-12T08:31:47-05:00

Hi, to all of you out there!

I recently bought an asus a7n8x-e deluxe motherboard after having a lot of problems with my former board the av7880 (also from ASUS). The av7880 did work fine at first, untill I often got bios errors. That's when I bought the a7n8x-e.
From day one I get the IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL messages when trying to install Windows XP home edition. I begin with holding down F6 at the start and installing the sata driver (3112) from floppy (copied from the ASUS installation cd) and the installation continues. Then at the menu I format the drive (WD 160GB) the normal way around (not the fast option, that is) and I wait and wait (this takes a long time, not surprisingly). But when the meter hits 100%, it hangs! Then I can wait for hours (and so I did!), but, as you may have guessed, That won't help! The system freezes. I tried this a lot of times, but it keeps repeating. I've exchanged everything that's inside the computer, Memory, Video card, Hard drive, removed all other cards (Soundblaster AUDIGY 2 ZS, Capture Card, etc.) even tried another Power Supply, Cd Drive etc. At first it seemed to work, but still the message came back eventually after couple of tries (I've tried it several times just to see if it was a random error or permenantly). Sometimes, the format procedure works and windows continues installing, but now and then eventually crashes (getting the same good old message: IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL). I've noticed that this happens after a pop up screen appears saying that the driver windows tries to install is not certified by windows, however I can't see which driver that is because it doesn't say so (but I guess it's the sata driver, though). Then after I click yes (Thus installing it) it takes some times and windows crashes again. But the time it takes before it crashes is not always the same,
so I can be mistaken. When I click no, however, it seems to continue installing untill it is complete! So, this is what I did the last time and continued installing all further ASUS drivers from the cd and updating to service pack 2, etc. Till now it seems to work fine. I can boot the system on and on, but no problems. So it seems it is only during the installation at first. I hope this reply helps with the problems other users have and wish you all the luck.

Athlon xp 3200+ (barton)
Asus a7n8x-e deluxe (bios rev. 13)
Twinmos single dimm 512mb
Radeon agp 9100
WD 160 GB sata
Fortron/Source 400w power supply