possible photoshop crash to boot.

[nom de grrr]

On the chance that this group would be the most likly to have run into this or a similar problem, I am posting this here.

I have an xp pro box that acts as a workstation for processing incoming digital images from artists. Most have no problem.

Yet a few crash the machine as if a reset button was pushed.  The files involved range from 200m to 700m and are all tiff created on a MAC with versions of photoshop both 7 and CS. They are also all manipulated from photographs. All are burned to dvd on a MAC as well. The same files can sometimes open fine (if a little slow) after crashing the machine. The same files can also be opened by several of the cheap office machines and once written to a network drive, I have not repeated the crash even on the original machine.  Those that crash will crash opening in photoshop or the default xp viewer or sometimes just by clicking on the name of the file in "my computer".

I assumed the problem was hardware to start since a crash to boot that leaves no drwatson log,  triggers no scandisk, triggers no event viewer or error message, was most likly hardware related.

I first tried replacing one and the both of the dvd drives. No help.


specs with replacement parts tried.

* asus p5wd2 premium mainboard
replaced with asus p5wd2-e premium mainboard
* p4 3.2g processor
replaced with p4 D (dual core) 3.2g processor
* two gig 533 DDR2 memory
replaced with two gig 667 DDR2
* Nvidia 6600 (256) pci-e video
replaced with nvidia 7300 (256)
antec 450w power sup replaced with known good 500w NIFT.

Tried 3 different dvd RW drives, 1 sata, 1 ultra ide, and 1 external usb2.0.
Testing was done with the raid drives unplugged and raid bios not loaded.

What I have not done is bypass the os drive and reinstall a bare bones XP with updates and a clean install of PS7. I am running out of time and this machine has to be back in service in the morning.

It crashes intermittently but only when reading these specific type files from a dvd .

I am returning it to service with the new configuration and am leaning towards assuming this is a "feature" or artifact of this mainboard io controller and these types of manipulated photoshop images, or some software bug of Microsofts that I happened to trigger with a rare but specific combination of hardware and software.

See anything I missed?

[TomConnor]

It is could be XP 'blue screening' on you - but in XP the display of the blue screen is disabled, and insted the system just reboots on what would otherwise have been a BSOD.

To enable blue screens (and disable the auto restart so you can actually see the error messages) do the following:

# Go to the Control Panel, and select 'System'
# Click on the 'Advanced' tab
# Under the Startup and Recovery section, click 'Settings'
# Under System Failure un-check "Automatically restart"

Then, try triggering the problem again, and see if you get a blue screen insted, note down the error message.  That should enable you to identify where the problem is.

Out of intrest, what configuration is your RAM in? And also, how is your GFX card set up, there is nothing like fastwrite enabled, is there (also, what mode is the BIOS running in? have you tried dropping the bios to safe mode or somesuch, in case its BIOS settings that are causing the problem?)?