PC Restarting By Itself (even after new HDD and rebuild)

[mixedup]

Hi - This is very unlikely to be due to GBPVR at all however just in case someone is aware of something I'm posting if that's ok. Re GBPVR see my signature too below.



I've just bought a new HDD and rebuild Windows XP as for a week or so before I was having my PC restart intermittently and I would hear a bit of a clunking sound (I assumed this was the primary HDD) around the same time.

I've now rebuilt windows and installed everything back on (PVR software like GBPVR, iTunes etc, done all the windows updates). I thought all was good but I am now getting the PC intermittantly rebooting by itself. Last time I had the PC on for say 15 minutes and then whilst using firefox it just rebooted, and after this it got into a loop where towards the end of the reboot it would reboot itself again.

Given I've just got a new HDD and XP rebuild (with latest patches) and I'm behind my NAT router, I'm assuming its a fairly sizeable hardware problem? (motherboard). The PC is a few years old and is a:

P4 1.6GHz, 1.2GB RAM, 2 x 300GB HDD, new video card too

[Q1] Does this sound familar to anyone? What would good guesses re whats going on.

[Q2] What's a good way to try to fault find here?

[Q3] Is there any software I could run to help track down the problem?


Thanks

[mixedup]

btw - the only funny thing I remember during the PVR installation was when I was installing the Twinhan BDA drivers I went to their website adn got the latest, however when I went to install them things FROZE during the installation and I had to manually reboot the PC.

After this I grabbed the previous version and then things installed/worked fine.

I'd assume the previous version driver installation would have overwritten the imcomplete latest version thought? Can these sorts of drivers potentially cause PC reboots anyway though?

[bgowland]

[Q2] What's a good way to try to fault find here?

Right-click 'My Computer' and select 'Properties' and select the 'Advanced' tab. Under the 'Startup and Recovery' section, click the 'Settings' button. Under 'System Failure' uncheck the 'Automatically restart' box and make sure the 'Write an event to the System log' box is checked. You'll probably also want to change the dropdown box under 'Write debugging information' so it doesn't do a complete memory dump - set it to none or small memory dump.

This won't fix your problem but hopefully you'll get a BSOD and associated log message which will explain what caused the crash. That's where the fault finding starts...

[bgowland]

Can these sorts of drivers potentially cause PC reboots anyway though?

Anything is possible - see my previous message and try to identify the dll/exe/driver that is implicated in the BSOD and Event log.

[mixedup]

excellent thanks - if I can't get the PC up again I'll try going into Windows Safe mode to get in (I google safe mode to find out the keys to press)

[hawk_2050]

Hi,

I recently upgraded my hard disk too. I originally had a Seagate 200GB SATA drive. The new one is 250GB SATA2. First off my motherboard had an older SATA controller chipset (Via VT8237) so I had to jumper the drive to force it to operate in SATA compatibility mode (no auto negotiation of interface speedt/type was occurring). Although this allowed me to get things up and running it would appear that the new drive is causing the SATA driver issues which results in Windows 2000 rebooting 2 or 3 times a day.

The System Event Log records the reboot events and gives some indication as to what caused it. You can look up the bugcheck error code on Microsofts site. It may give you some clue.

Mine says something like "The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x000000d1 (0x00000010, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0xbf48e741). Microsoft Windows 2000 [v15.2195]. A dump was saved in: C:\WINNT\Minidump\Mini042806-02.dmp.

What kind of interface do your new hard disks have? Is this different to what you had before?

Cheers
Richard

[mixedup]

My PC's a bit older so I don't even have the SATA drives. I think I may be seeing the same problem that I started to see before I upgraded the HDD (ie I think I may have falsely diagnosed the problem). I'm in the process of trying to look at the dumps. The error I got last time was something like

STOP 0xxxxxxx8E (OxC000005, Ox804D9079, OxB63D98OC, 0x00000000)

Given that GBPVR and my system had worked fine before the HDD reinstall I did, and before the problem arose a few days before teh HDD reinstall, I'm kind of guessing I've got some fundamental hardware problem. Like it's not as if I'd just updated drivers or installed new hardware.

[bgowland]

Hmmm. As with a number of STOP errors, 0x0000008E has a few variants. Possibilities from searches I've done suggest RAM issues - either mainboard or graphics card RAM and also hardware acceleration settings for graphics cards (which could also tie in with degraded graphics card hardware). There are others though (including hitting a certain key combination at a certain time - go figure!).

If you have a spare graphics card then I'd personally start by swapping that in. If that doesn't fix it, and you have more than one mainboard RAM module, take all out except one then swap them in/out in turn and see if that fixes things.

[fhmanas]

Have you checked the power supply of your machine, it might be over heating causing it to reboot or hang.

[JonnyCam]

Yeah, What brand is the ram in your PC? I brought some cheap ram when putting together my PC (A-Data or V-Data whichever was the cheaper one) and I get random restarts when trying to access files, doing some encoding - any random times (somethign as simple as rename a file) - this is on my non-PVR machine.

Replaced the cheap ram with a better brand and have had no issues since.

Thanks