Weird problem, please help me!

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

Well, I got a pretty bad situation on my hands and I don't really know what to do.

Heres what happens...

My parents have a computer that I built for them, that has been working fine until a few days ago. When your using the computer it will just suddenly restart. Now, this isnt an overclocked machine and your prolly thinking its the power supply.. The thing is that the power supply voltages are all where they should be. What I did notice is that when it restars and I go into the bios, the hardrive isnt detected. For some reason the hardrive seems to power off by itself while in windows. The hardrive is a Western Digital 30 GB 7200 RPM HD. I'll list the rest of the specs as well..

Athlon Xp 2000+
Asus A7V-333
1024 PC2100 Micron
Antec 350 Watt

Has anyone heard of this happening? Any comments or solutions?
Any help is appreciated! Thankyou

 

[mdcomp]

Do you hear the hard drive spin down or anything?
If we can generate a BSOD error it will be helpful because then we can use the information in it to figure out whats wrong. To enable the computer to report this error instead of just automatically restart try this...
Right-click my computer
Properties
Advanced Tab
Startup and Recovery Settings
Uncheck automatically restart and make sure everything else Under System failure is checked

Also check the event viewer, some information might be in there, too. If you do get a BSOD copy down what it says. Thats very helpful in solving problems. Good luck!

Matt

 

[sensai]

fat32 or ntfs ?? nothing has been changed installed etc since before it was working??including updates ? is the hard drive making a really obnoxious noise.. a virus will do that...

 

[BowerR64]

what makes you think that just because the volates are ok the PSU is no ta problem?

There could be dust on one of the componets causing it to over heat quickly and then it thermal shutsdown and reboots.

Is the fan in the PSU working? is there anyway you can try a different powersupply?

can you blow out the back of the powersupply with an air hose? remove it blow it out then reinstall it.

it still sounds like a powersupply problem, you could even have a flaky cap. what board is it? there was a string of abit boards that had faulty caps and they did this same things.

I had 2 boards that had flaky caps and they both would randomly reboot.

they funny thing is the caps were blowing up and i had no idea what it was. Once it was early in the morning and a cap poped and i thought it was some punk outside my window throwing the snapper things. The machine ran fine for abou t6 months after the caps popped. Real freaky problem but eventualy they each one at a time failed and caused the machine to reboot and be unstable.

BE6-2, BX133 and a few others that had a batch of bad caps. There was a big write up about this because the cap manufacture was a big distributer for many large companys that sold a ton of big name electronics.

check into it.

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

Its running FAT32 on windows xp. I have ran the "Windows Western Digital Diagonostics" and it says the drive passes all the tests. I want to check the event viewer to, so Ill post those results as well.

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

Looks like in the eventviewer...no errors have happened. Is their a different way to find out what caused the shutdown?

Also, this computer has been working like I said, and I thought it may have been a virus, so I reformatted, but to no avail. Its till reboots. I hear the drive make a noise that sounds like its winding down when this happens. Then on the post screen I hear it click back on.

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

I changed that setting like you said and I got the blue screen error, so heres pretty much what it said.

_________________________________________________
Win32k.sys
Page_Fault_In_Nonpaged_Area
Stop: 0x00000050 (0x8B00023F, 0x00000001,0xBF83F9CF, 0x00000000

win32l.sys - Address BF83F9CF base at BF800000 Datestamp 3d6de5e5

Begging Memory Dump
__________________________________________________
...and thats what it said, so can anyone find whats causing it now?

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

Well I did a windows update on the machine to see if that would fix some problems, but apparently it gave me another one. After rebooting from installing the updates, I was surfing the web on that machine and I got a crash in internet explorer and then got a blue screen with this error.

Error code 0000004e, parameter1 00000099, parameter2 00000000, parameter3 00000000, parameter4 00000000.

This one is a little different from the previous...

Error code 10000050, parameter1 8b00023f, parameter2 00000001, parameter3 bf83f9cf, parameter4 00000000.

..but both do not have any specific reports on them and microsoft says this "Error Caused by a Device Driver"

 

[mdcomp]

Well I found this article at MSKB . It refers to a device driver and came up when I searched for the Page Fault. Not sure if thats it though. Page faults usually have to do with memory, though, so you tested that right? Guess that is ruled out. Try doing scandisk just to make sure the hard drive is functioning all right. The more possibilities we rule out the easier it will get to figure out whats wrong because only a few things will be left. Good luck!

Matt

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

The things I have done to try to correct this problem are as follows....

Scandisk
Hardrive Diagnostics
Memory Tests
Stabibility Tests
Windows Update
Deleted Partition/Renewed
Reformatted
New power supply on its way

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

Ran prim95...

After 10 minutes prime failed. I think its the power supply.

 

[mrgreenjeans]

Which memory test did you run and since it's an ASUS board, do you have the Smart Probe installed and monitoring the voltage history? Might show up some incongruencies in voltage before the actual shutdown. Might also be used to monitor the heating. If you enabling the history setting you can open after reboot and see what happened right up until the crash.

 

[Bon3thugz43v3r]

I ran the one windows provides to download, and I ran memtest 86. I am running the probe, and I do see significant drops in voltage at times, sometimes it spikes really high to. Hopefully the new fortron 350 power supply that I ordered from newegg will fix this mess.