Random reboot... :*( **Another Problem**

[Thalasi]

Hey there everybody, I did a seach on random rebooting probs and seen there's been a few, but what was said in the threads didn't really help me much. A while back I had a random reboot problem but it seemed to go away all by itself. Now about a month later it has returned. Some times my machine will restart the second windows is up, other times it will be 30 minutes to an hour before it reboots. I've updated every driver that I could possible find and made sure there wasn't yet another new bios for my board.
For my system spec see them in my sig.
Along with those specs I have an Enermax EG465P-VE FC power supply.

One thing I've noticed is that when it does reboot is seems like it takes the hard drive a cupple seconds longer to spin up, about 2 seconds after the bios detects it you can hear it finially spin up. Could this possibly be a sign of a bad hard drive or perhaps the motherboard. I just got this board so I hope it's not faulty. I've tried new IDE cables, unplugging all the cd-roms, using a different molex for the hard drive, set bios settings to a bare minimal settings, I just don't have another power supply to try out.


Anyways, any help with this would be wonderful. I'm just stumped after a day of tryin' to fix it.

 

[Mustanggt]

Might wana to try to switch that PS see if that helps if you have another one around.

 

[Thalasi]

The only one I have is an old 230Watt AT.

 

[Thalasi]

Just on a side note here, my DigiDoc V reports ~5.14v & ~12.57v.

 

[LuDaCriS66]

Could be a memory problem too.. check your memory modules.

 

[Thalasi]

That it could be... I did try each of my 2 strips individually and it still rebooted but I haven't got a chance to try any other memory since I don't have any layin' around. I'll get a strip from my bud tomorrow.

 

[Thalasi]

Nope, not the memory. It's still doin' it...

 

[Thalasi]

Okay, I'm getting a new error now:

__
Explorer.EXE - Application Error
The instruction at "0x77f81611" referenced memory at "0x00000076". The memory could not be "read".
Click on OK to terminate the program.

| OK |
__


It's comming up very often now.
Anyone know what this could mean?

 

[gdawson6]

I got an error similar to that when i messed with my memory settings. Go and set the memory settings to default and see what you get.

I was getting random reboots when i was on the internet with my 8KHA+ and found out it was actually the AC97' chip. If i was running winamp and went on the internet i would freeze almost immediately. Now i put in a pci soundcard and absolutely no errors.

 

[Thalasi]

gdawson6 - that's exactly what I thought it was at first because I do run my memory rather aggresively. But I did set the memory timings, as well as the entire BIOS back to their default settings, without any luck.
I do have a PCI sound card in at the moment - an Audigy - which replaced my Live not too long ago. If it was a problem with that though I would wonder why it had stopped for so long then decided to show itself again.... arg
Thanks for your opinion on things though. No body seems to know whats wrong here.

I'm running Memtest-86 on the machine at the moment to make sure there are no problems with my ram... it's been goin' for ~50 minutes now without and errors processed... yet anyway. It's about 75% done.

Anyone else think they know what's wrong?

 

[circut16]

Sounds like your board maybe bad
had the same prob

 

[Thalasi]

circut16 - and a replacement with the same board fixed it? Did you have the Dragon+ also?

 

[Thalasi]

Well there are no problems with the memory after running the test twice.
I guess it's time to format. That should tell me if it's a hardware problem or not.

 

[Thalasi]

Okay... I've formatted... It's still doing it!! :|
But it did not start until after I had installed these:
All Device Drivers
WinZip 8.1
SiSoft Sandra 2002
WindowsBlinds 3.1
IconPackager 1.51
Trillian 0.722
So if it is a software problem I would think it would be related to one of them.
If it is indeed my motherboard I have no way to test it to be sure. I don't have another one similar to this one so that I can use all the same hardware.

Arrrg... why is this happening.
Does anybody have ANY ideas?

 

[usas]

Perhaps you should try installing VIA's latest 4-in-1 drivers. I had a problem like that where more than 15 seconds of cd-rm usage would restart my computer. Installed the latest 4-in-1's and the problem went away. Of course it could be a faulty processor also, have anyway to test that? Try installing the 4-in-1's first though.

 

[kjwise]

I've had this kind of problem, and guess what, sometimes, where drivers fail, the motherboard seems stable, and all the
memory sticks in the world wont do you any good, it might be the harddisk.
But alas, what happens when the harddisk seems to be just fine but still, it seems to be the hard disk?

The powerplug/ide plug of your harddisk!

I had a problem where one of my drives drove me mad until I found out why,
the back of the power interface plug of the HD there was a rift between the pin that connects the yellow wire
to the hard drive, but most of the time that rift would be sealed, but because of vibrations from the HD
the rift could open enough to shut down the drive for a second or two.

This, my friend, makes up for some very funky random boot errors and other blue screens
of death.

What I did was rather err... unconventional,
I soldered an Y-Adapter (you know, used to give you two more plugs from the PS by connecting one plug into it's port)
from which I cut off one of the plugs,
to the back of the HD, using the same order of wires as if I'd be
connecting it to the interface, so I wouldn't be using the unreliable power plug of the HD.

Since then the HD has performed very reliable,
but it'll void your warranty for good.

 

[Thalasi]

<< Perhaps you should try installing VIA's latest 4-in-1 drivers. >>



heh... that would be under device drivers. Version 4.37v(a) to be exact. I thought it was common sense to install them first, 'cept when using WinXP, so I didn't list it seperately from device drivers.

 

[sandorski]

Using WinXP? Make sure the "restart on error" is turned off, unfortunetly, I don't remember where that setting is. Also, when this happens, does WinXP ask you to send the error to Microsoft? If it does, what does it say the problem is. If it doesn't, you may want to find the setting where you can enable it to do so(again I dunno what the setting is, I'm a WinXP noob)

 

[Thalasi]

I'm using Win2K like it says in my System Rig Profile. I know about the restart on system failure and have been able to get the error messages from the bsod's. I'm pretty sure now that my problem is not hardware based so this thread is caputz.
Thanks anyways.