home pc problem

My regular house homebrew pc is acting up.

Last night while on the internet my pc all of a sudden rebooted. It worked fine afterwards and later the next afternoon it did the same thing. Now the computer will turn on yet it will not post. I opened the pc, looked around, sprayed off any collected dust and checked all the wiring everything looks okay.

I moved the ide cable on the harddrive and it booted fine but rebooted after 5 minutes.

I havent installed updated anything in my pc in the past month.

Any help and or suggestions would greatly appreciated. As things always work out, I was planning on buying a portable harddrive to backup data and now my pc decides to crap out.

Thanks
Marcos

If you're using Win 2k or above, turn off the auto restart on crash (Control Panel->System->Advanced somewhere). At least then you'll get blue screens instead of reboots.

If you have fast boot enable in the bios, turn that off - bad memory can cause crazy things to happen, and the slow boot should check memory (a guy at work had a bad dimm 411Mb into memory, which caused random blue screens).

Unplug everything, remove each device (card, memory, processor, etc) and reseat.

If it still acts up after all that, start throttling back bus speeds, disabling processor caches, removing/replacing components till you remove/replace the bad bit.


Rob

Auto restart on crash is a BIOS thing Rob. So Mitokondria, check the BIOS for that. Also, I would try installing a temp monitor, such as MBM5. Google for it, or download the file @ my site (www button at bottom of this post) in the Downloads section. Setup is explained @ their site, and its really easy.

My thought is perhaps you are overheating :) That is my only thought if nothing else is changed. Can you list the specs of it (The computer) as well?

I had a similar experience a few months ago. My system would randomly reboot. I noticed smething strange during posting. The memory size would fluctuate. I have 2 - 256MB PC2100 sticks. But sometime it would post the full 512 and other times only 384. I pulled one stick to narrow down the one causing the problem and sent it back to crucial for replacement under lifetime warranty.

If you have another stick of working memory in a different PC, try swapping and seeing if the system will post. I would also pull out any unneccessary hardware until you can narrow down the problem.

This may also be a sign from God. Is it time for an upgrade?

My desktop also did this last week and I had to add some case fans and clear away some IDE cables. I think SiGmA_X is correct in that your computer might be overheating. When I did this, my comp ran cooler and I have not seen the problem since...

astral

Quote:

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Originally posted by SiGmA_X
Auto restart on crash is a BIOS thing Rob.

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Not on my Win 2k box at work it isn't. Visual Studio .net used to happily reboot my machine for me.

And not according to this either (read the fourth message down, from DutchMaster):

http://www.techimo.com/forum/tid3817...pn1/index.html

I thank you...! ;-)


Rob

Rob - Weird. On all my systems, it's a BIOS controled thing. As you know, on restart the mobo controls the re-boot. So I guess it's a bit of both.

I have had it come it come from heat, and also had it come from bad power supplies and bad memory. maybe run some diags on it.

I guess I should have given some specs:

XP Pro
Athlon XP 1700
Soyo K7V Dragon Plus
1 stick of 512 PC 2100 DDR Ram (I think Samsung)
WesternDigital 60 GB harddrive
ATI 8500DV with current catalyst drivers
SoundBlaster Live Platinum
Generic 4 Port USB 2.0 Card
My case has 2 intake and 2 exhaust fans all fans are working properly.
Rounded cables and completely dust free, lol (clean it last night)
CPU has a thermaltake volcano fan which is also working properly.

PC has been working great without a single problem for the part 18+ months.

The thing with the PC is that it turns on and all the drive led's light up but the pc will not post or do anything. If it does post and load windows, I have like 2 or 3 minutes tops before it reboots. So installing proggies is out of the question unless for some lucky reason I can pull it off.

I did install Visual Studio .Net for school like 2 months ago. And that crazy **** tries to debug everything.

I was thinking of resetting the cmos if that may help.

Ill read the other forum to see what I can come up with.

Thanks for all the help guys
Marcos

What are the temps like? Did the heatsink become somewhat loose?

I was getting bad reboots like that and I didn't realize that my video card fan was spinning really slow.. replaced it and reboots went away. But if you say all fans are running ok..

Other than that, might want to try some different RAM if at all possible as people have been suggesting.