I will give the short version then the long version of the story:

Short:

I have been experiencing random reboots since I first had my computer built by tech guy#1 three years ago. Sometimes they come when I am running multiple apps, sometimes they come when I am only running one app. Sometimes I get blue screens with error messages, mostly I get some weird freeze or a straigt up reboot with no warning or message, usually while I am doing something painstaking.

Here is what I’m running

First, here is what I’m running:

Power Supply: Antec truepower atx12v TRUE380 – replaced with Thermaltake Pure power ATX 12v 2.0 500w.
HD: IBM 120 GB 7200RPM
CPU: AMD XP 2600 OEM
MB: ABIT-)11 NF& nForce2
RAM: CORSAIR 512MB DDR 2700, maybe defective,
Soudn Card: SB Audigy 2 platinum
CRRW PLEXTOR 48x24x48
Lacie 180G external hard drive.
A scanner, a printer, a viewsonic monitor

Virus Protection: eTrust.
Ran online scans: 4 infections
Ran spyware scans: no problem

I have reinstalled windows half a dozen times in the last three years or so.

Long:

I have had help from a couple of people who all proved to not be able to solve the problem, and I have taken hundreds of e-mails from the craigslist forum. Mostly what people have to offer is: bad ram, bad power supply, software/driver issues. Some people say that the combination of my motherboard and video card could be buggy.

Hers what’s been done so far: I had a totally nutsoid tech (#2) guy off Craig’s list come over and scan my hardrive and play with the BIOS settings a little. This forestalled reboots for a long time, but then they came back with increasing regularity to the point where the comp was unusable.

I then found another guy to help me (#3) I dropped off my comp at his home. He determined that the computer was incredibly dusty inside, and also that the Antec power supply was “daisy chained” incorrectly so that the smallest components were getting juice before the larger ones, in particular the video card. I cant remember if he said if the card supported the power supply or not. I cant remember if he said there was a motherboard issue or not. He cleaned it pretty good, although may have not cleaned the motherboard so good. He ordered me a new power supply, the Thermaltake above. He never finished installing it and handed it off to me to wire myself. He also recommended that I buy more RAM as I had the one corsair stick and one cheap Kingston stick which was capping off the good stick. I wired the new power supply to the best of my ability, but the comp wouldn’t turn on. This power supply came with a stupid watts viewer and fan speed adjuster with two knobs for the front. When I disconnected it from the main power supply the comp fired up, but only after I turned off the main power and drained the capacitor, then turned back on. Now it turns on without doing this.

I told tech guy #3 about this and he said that his vendor said a defect was possible. He said he’d swap my power supply with the vendor, then disappeared.

So, at the moment, I’m stuck with a possibly defective power supply and the reboots are recurring again, coming closer and closer together again. Thermaltake hasn’t gotten back to me and I tech guy #3 has my old power supply so Ill be SOL while the replacement is in the mail.

It seems like this is an endless pattern- whether I make hardware changes or software changes, reinstall windows, eventually the reboots come back. Nevertheless, I have yet to get a perfect power supply in there, or adequate RAM, and I want to believe that either of these will solve the problem so that I don’t have to start over with CPU, MB, or video card, or just give up and lease a Dell. Does anyone see a bad relationship between any of these main pieces of hardware? Is there something nobody is seeing, like a bad hard drive? I’ve tweaked the BIOS and windows a lot to no avail.

Anyway, Im new here and I hope this post isn’t misplaced or has holes in the information. I am not a computer idiot but I don’t know much about hardware fixes.

Thanks all.
Back to top

lavaspit, that's a sad story for sure. It's especially sad that the tech took off with one of the best power supplies on the market, that was almost for certain not the cause of the problem.

However, there is one thing in there that makes me wonder. Well, two things. You are running an internal hard drive, right? Not trying to boot off the Lacie that is? That's guaranteed to cause problems.

Assuming there is an internal hard drive, what is it?

Your components sound very good, no cheapo stuff, although mixing memory was not a good idea in general, although both kingston and corsair are good products.

Since you've reinstalled the OS, you can pretty much forget about viruses and spyware being the issue.

The thing that I think here is significant is that a tech did test your hard drive, which also fixes errors, but then after a while of no problems the reboots started again. This is very typical of hard drive problems, the disk is defective, you fix the bad sectors, it works for a while, then starts giving problems again.

However, if you are running the system off an external drive, that just isn't very reliable, and could be the cause of the errors, windows doesn't really like external hard drives very much, I have problems with those all the time.

And if windows is losing connection to the external drive routinely, that can cause issues.

To see if you have windows detected drive issues, go to your 'control panel', select 'administrative tools', select 'event viewer', and look at the system logs, if you see red flags, click on them, that will open up the error message window. If you see error messages related to disks, that's the problem.

Sounds like you're in pc hell, that's for sure. You are running Windows XP I assume? Or not?

On the bright side, if the system ran stably for a while after the tech worked on the hard drive, that points away from both bad memory and a bad motherboard, which is very good.

Everything points to the hard drive as the main culprit from what you've written.

PS, welcome to the forums by the way...
Back to top

Hey there,

first of all, thank you. And dotn get me wrong, none of these tech guys were bad folk. I just think that they were overextended.

Anyway, if by red flags you mean red X's, erros, yes, I see lots. My hardrive is IBM 120 GB 7200RPM.

I am runing XP.

Also, no I am not bootign form the external, its just abackup.

So its my internal drive eh? Any way to repair it? If not, can you recommend a reliable one?

What to do about the power suppy sitution? Should I go back to Antec or what?

Thanks so much!
Back to top

Ok, good. Can you reboot, then check all the red x'es that appear after the reboot. To get the information you need, just double click on each red x'ed item one by one.

List them all here, from the time of the last reboot, the relevant information is:

event id: [for example, 4001]
source: [for example, Service control manager]

The odds are very high there will be disk read errors.


Oh, I should have known, the legendary IBM hard drives, the worst batch of hard drives to hit the market since who knows when, cursed around the world [they were sued for their bad quality for those of you counting], drives so bad that when my local computer store put them on sale the sales guys wouldn't let me buy one since they sort of knew me.

That's pretty much all I needed to see in this case.

The life of a computer tech is hard, but I'm not a fan of just randomly replacing components because I think it might be bad, I want to know it's bad, and I know the IBM series is bad.

Currently, the top quality hard drives are being put out by seagate or maxtor, seagate have a 5 year warranty, maxtor 3 years, but currently zipzoomfly, who I usually get most of my stuff from, doesn't have fast seagate IDE drives, I guess they're being phased out now.

I assume you're running an IDE hard drive, not SATA, correct?

These are the ones I'd get:

Maxtor 120 gig or this 120 gig, assuming you want to stay with IDE and 120 gig.

The main things to look for are 8 mB cache, UDMA 133 speed. Either Maxtor or Seagate.

If you have SATA, which I think your board doesn't, not positive, you made a typo on the board number so I can't tell, I'd get SATA drives, but IDE 133 are fine too, there's not a huge speed difference on older SATA stuff, and IDE is more stable anyway.


Ideally, the tech would have left the antec with you, since it's yours, you paid for it, he didn't. Antecs are great, thermaltakes are good too, but if you got a buggy one, that's not great.

However, in this case, I'd assume the power supply is good and the drive is bad, but we'll know for sure when you supply the error codes.
Back to top

If you run an antivirus scan and it can't get rid of the viruses, you'll have to do a more advanced method to dump them.

I'm not familiar with your antivirus product, if it's free, this is what I'd do:

Uninstall it, since it isn't working anyway.

Install one of the following:

AVG or Antivir [download information here

I like antivir, AVG is good too, both are free, and quite good.

Do all the updates for the virus definitions.

Once you're updated, reboot, except this time boot into safe mode.

You do that by hitting F8 while you're booting into windows, you have to do it fast, right when windows starts from the bios, if you miss it, just reboot.

When you get into the safe mode screen, select 'boot into safe mode'.

Booting into safemode takes a while, once you're in, you'll see a plain screen with 'safe mode' all over it.

Open up whichever antivirus program you downloaded, I'd start with antivir because it's so small, and tends to catch a lot of stuff.

Run the antivirus program, in safe mode. Safe mode keeps things like viruses from running, they can't be deleted when they are running, although antivir tends to do pretty well at this, so does pandasoft, without being in safe mode, but if you're in safe mode, it will get everything.

That should take care of the viruses, especially if you do the scan one time, reboot [and remember, in XP you have to turn off that damned 'feature' that replaces the viruses you just deleted, what's it called, let me think, can't remember, oh yeah, system restore, turn that off, I think you find it in 'control panel' -> system -> system restore, uncheck the restore option, if you don't, XP will happily reinstall the viruses for you [reason 1231 I don't use XP]

But the IBM hard drive, I'd put money on it, I've never seen a good desktop ibm hard drive, they used a new type of material for the disk, and it breaks]
Back to top

Oh, and if you don't already have one, get a UPS, a battery back up power supply, for your needs a basic 300 or 350 watt rated one is fine, especially if you don't plug your monitor into it.

This can save your system from getting toasted long term, simple surge protectors will only do so much when it comes to dirty electricity.

You can pick those up cheap from places like office max or office depot. APC makes good ones. This APC would be fine, for example.


why am I not surprised? Why do you think they used an IBM hard drive? It's because they were dumped in mass, and could be picked up really cheap by tech system builders. Why were they dumped? Because they sucked big time, I think IBM ended up selling their hard drive business to Hitachi after that, they gave up, more or less anyway. And all those silicon valley system builders bought them up for probably half the price a good drive cost, like a Maxtor or Seagate, thus saving themselves about $40 on your system. This is so typical, it's why I avoid those guys now, and only build my own.
Back to top

Hey,

Ok here they are:

Service Control Manager
7023

Service Control Manager
7000

Thats it since last reboot. There are some warnigns, too.

Couple questions:

Is the data on my drive safe? Will it be corrupted even if I burn it or lifeboat it to a new drive?

Not only does my sytem reboot btu it has been REALLY sluggish since this last round of help, which included takign out the second stick of RAM. Could this be hardrive related too?

Why in the hell didnt this last guy check the errors adn the hardrive? He seemd all super genius.

Sorry, I dont know th edifference between SATA and the other. Can you refer me to some NFO on that?

Thanks, Ill be checking back all evening.

J
Back to top

erik- I run eTrust, but it was off withouth my knowing it for a few weeks. I found 4 infections with the above online utilities. I thought eTrust was pretty solid, is that not the case?

J.
Back to top

Both of these require more information, the description and the category fields, but it looks to me like parts of your hard disk got corrupted, and certain services are not able to start because the physical file is incomplete. But I'd run the hard disk utitility to make sure, I created a zip file version of it, download it here, it's a pain to dig it up from the ibm/hitachi sites.

Download this, save to disk somewhere, unzip it, click on setup.exe, that will start the program to create your boot ibm hard drive test floppy disk. Make sure you use a good floppy, those tend to go bad if left out in the open.

The program will write what it needs to the hard drive test floppy. When it's done, leave the floppy in your floppy disk drive, in, then reboot, you may need to change your bios to boot from floppy as the first option if it's not set to that now.

If all goes well, dos will start, the floppy will load the test utility program, select your ibm drive as the one you want to test, then do the quick test. If it fails that, your drive is toast. If it passes, run the advanced test. DO NOT RUN THE PART that returns the disk to factory defaults, this will destroy all your data. Run the advanced test, it takes about an hour or two, go and have a beer or something while it runs, it's not very interesting.

If it found a bunch of errors and reports them fixed, the drive is toast, since this was already done recently.

I'm also not familiar with that Antivirus you're running, so since I don't know it, I won't comment on it, but if it's not catching 4 viruses that's not impressive, try running it and see if it catches them. If it does, and just won't delete them in standard windows mode, start windows in safe mode, and run that antivirus program, it should be able to get rid of them. If it can't, then it's not a good program, and I'd dump it.


It would seem that appearances were deceiving I'd say, no? The first thing you do when facing a new problem box is look at for red flags in the system logs, those are extremely serious errors, and are usually the sign of what's actually going on.

For example, replacing the power supply before resolving the red flags is a total waste of time and money, since the power supply will not cause red flags in almost all cases, but corrupt data, bad drivers, bad hard disks etc, will.
Back to top

Hey,

OK. Will do. uut can I do the same form CD? I dont have a disk drive.
Back to top