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View Full Version : Crashing Problem Diagnosis?

guypapyrus
07-20-2005, 12:32 AM
This latest heat wave appears to have given rise to some crashing trouble with my home office computer (Athlon64 2800+, Gigabyte K8N mobo, WinXP SP2, Western Digital HDs (300GB and 120GB), 1GB RAM). I'll be working along when it'll suddenly crash and restart (no blue screen). Somewhere in the boot sequence, I get a message (all in caps) to the effect that there's something wrong; insert a system disk and reboot (don't remember the exact wording). Rebooting doesn't do any good immediately; but letting the computer sit powered down for a while (at least 10 minutes) lets me reboot normally (though sometimes it will run chkdisk; sometimes, finding and correcting problems, sometimes not finding anything).

So I have 3 theories:
1. The computer is overheating (the powered-down part seems to point to this)
2. I'm getting dirty power due to all kinds of ACs, fans, etc. running to keep the climate tolerable (and it's a losing battle lately :sad: ). I just bought a UPS, as I've been meaning to for a while anyway
3. Defective HD (the 300GB one -- the system drive -- is pretty new, maybe 3 months old;the system partition is whatever the max size XP pre-SP2 allowed)

Any thoughts?

Best,
Andrew
guypapyrus
07-20-2005, 02:58 AM
Just DLed some diagnostic utilities; I'll see if I can post more complete details when I get home... if not solve the problem myself. :)
guypapyrus
07-20-2005, 10:50 PM
Update: So I got home last night and loaded up some diagnostic utilities. Western Digital's gave my system drive a clean bill of health; drives were running in the high 30s Celsius, and my processor in the low 40s, all of which seemed normal. I'd still crash after not very long, but I never saw see any temperature spikes. I also had bought a UPS (which I'd been meaning to to for a while anyway), but I had a crash not long setting it up and powering up.

Today, I tried putting in a different HD to reinstall Windows and see if the drive really was bad, but then it didn't even detect the replacement when booting. I put the original one back in, and it not only worked, but it's been on now for well over 2 hours. I'm inclined to think one of the cables had loosened a bit: I had a not too different problem a while back because I'd failed to put a DIMM in all the way. I think I tend to get a little squeamish trying to connect things to the mobo. :D

Anyway, it seems that the problem is solved for the time being. No news will be good news, as far as this thread goes.

Best,
Andrew
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07-20-2005, 10:50 PM
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