# Random system reboots, power supply or firewire problem?



## Buccura (Jul 17, 2007)

Lately, my system seems to randomly reboot itself without any warning or notice. I thought this might be a general heat problem so I used an air compressor and blew out all the dust in the system. I load it back up and still at certain points it does an automatic reboot. I noticed that it does this whenever I play a game on an external 80gig HD I have attached to my computer VIA a firewire cable. At first though I thought maybe the power supply is going bad, or perhaps something is wrong with my DVD-Rom drive (Wouldn't be the first time that damn thing gave me issues). So I popped in Starcraft and fiddled around in the game, but otherwise some graphical issues that I can probably resolve on a later day, there was no reboot. I noticed though, that the computer did it mostly when I was playing Thief Gold, which is installed on the external HD. Also, almost anytime I run something on that HD, be it my Bit Torrent Program or Doom 3, it eventually gives me an error message of the program crashing. I'm wondering if perhaps this might be a problem with my External HD, the firewire cable itself, or maybe the device being used to hold it.

Anyone else have this issue, or a similar one?


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## Oni (Jul 17, 2007)

To diagnose your situtation, I would install Theif Gold into an internal hard drive, then run the program and wait to see if your system crashes.

Now regarding the errors you have with other programs when they are stored in your external hardrive, Do the same as the above. Install the programs into an internal hard drive and wait for errors. 

Personally, i would use an external hardrive to store music, videos, and other media and files. I would not use an external hardrive to store programs and games.


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## Buccura (Jul 17, 2007)

Oni said:
			
		

> To diagnose your situtation, I would install Theif Gold into an internal hard drive, then run the program and wait to see if your system crashes.
> 
> Now regarding the errors you have with other programs when they are stored in your external hardrive, Do the same as the above. Install the programs into an internal hard drive and wait for errors.
> 
> Personally, i would use an external hardrive to store music, videos, and other media and files. I would not use an external hardrive to store programs and games.



I was actually going to try that. I'm doing a scan for bad sectors then a defragmentation, but after that if it doesn't make a difference I'll try installing Thief Gold to the internal drives and see if I still get the same problem.


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## Buccura (Jul 17, 2007)

Alright, I did the fragment and scan but it didn't change anything. It did make Thief Gold last a little longer but it still eventually rebooted. Later tonight I'm going to try relocating Thief Gold to an internal Drive. It's small enough that I can copy pasta it (Only about 1 gig. Yay for 1998 games). If this is the case then I guess my external HD really isn't meant for games. Strange though because it never did this before in all the months I've had it.


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## yak (Jul 18, 2007)

1. Contacts. You can have problems with loose contacts PC-cable and HDD-cable. I'm having a similar issue with my 2.5' 160Gig USB HDD.
2. Firewire. I don't know much about it, but suspect that at the transfer rate it boasts, interference to the cable can cause data transmission errors. Move it away from any source of electromagnetic field?
3. Heat. Does your HDD or the chipset on your motheboard heat up to the point where you can barely hold your finger on it? If so, apply some better cooling.
4. Software, system. Never underestimate the glitchines of Windows. In 95% of all cases, all errors are caused by it and are eliminated with a clean install.
4.1 Software, game. If the error occurs _only_ when you're playing Thief, then i guess Thief is what's causing it.
5. PSU. Plug in everything you can in the USB, firewire and plain old auxiliary 5/12V jacks from the PSU, then check the voltage monitor in the BIOS. See if there's a significant (more then 0.5V) difference between what voltage the outlet is supposed to have and what are you seeing. Replace PSU with something better then 25$ cheap "550Watt" crap - it makes even more sense considering our current weather and it's daily temperatures.


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## dave hyena (Jul 18, 2007)

Checking heat sinks and so on, *after* blowing out all the dust might be a good idea.

I used a compressed air can to give my computer thorough cleaning a few days ago. Yet afterward, my graphics card which routinely runs at about 45c was running at a minimum of about 86c to 89c, heading up to as much as 115c or more when playing games. Crashes abounded.

So, I took out my graphics card and used the air can to blow through it's heat sinks and fan and lo and behold, out came a whole load of dust which had presumably settled there from when I was blowing out the rest of the computer. After that, the graphics card now happily runs at 45c again.


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## HaTcH (Jul 18, 2007)

It may be an operating system error you can diagnose without opening your case or installing any software.

Do this:
Start>Run> Type in 'eventvwr.msc' and hit enter.

Browse around in the System, Application, and Security logs around about the time your computer restarted itself. Usually, you'll have a red 'X' or a yellow caution sign as the icon for an event that may have duped your system. When you open it up, it will give you a description of what the problem was, and offer you a way to get either more information, or fix the issue.

It's typically a driver/resource clash that the OS has a problem dealing with, so it just reboots.

I dust out my computers as well, once or twice a year with an air compressor and a jet nozzle. My 1 IMPORTANT piece of advice.... Tie up the fan blades on every fan before you take the compressed air to your machine. The speed of the air can destroy the bearings in the fans... For things like your power supply, just shove something in the grill of the fan and blow it out. Don't forget your hard drives too!


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## Buccura (Jul 18, 2007)

I'll take all this into advice and look it over. It actually does not just do it when I play Thief. Actually last night, it did it shortly after windows was finished booting up, and I didn't even do anything with it yet. I'll run  the eventvwe.msc that HaTcH suggested and see what I can find. Otherwise though, I think I may have to get a new power supply. My computer actually is getting kind of old. To be honest I'm surprised it's lasted as long as it has. Most computers I know by this point in it's life just stop working. Anyway, I'll keep trying some things suggested here and see what happens. Thanks for the advice everyone, every little bit helps.


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## HaTcH (Jul 18, 2007)

I've had power supplies go bad on me before, usually they result in a system that either won't boot at all or freezes randomly.


How many watts is your power supply? Is it the original OEM one? What type of processor do you have/amount of ram and how many devices do you have on your system. (hard drives, CD-roms, etc)

Power supplies that come in OEM computers (OEMs being stuff like Dells, HPs, Gateways etc) are usually subsistence and not ready to accept more than what was already in the computer. So if you've added things to your box and your PS is 200 or less watts, You'll most likely have issues with it.

Try disconnecting any non boot hard drives (C: basically) temporarily and see if your computer still keeps restarting.


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## Buccura (Jul 19, 2007)

It is about 550 watts and I believe it is the original OEM one. My CPU a 3.2ghz Processor with I think 1.5 gigs of RAM in it. As far devices I have a 3D Card, Sound Card, a DVD-Rom, and several Hard Drives, one which is attached through the aforementioned firewire cable.

I'll try booting it up without the Firewire attached HD tonight and see if it makes any difference.


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## HaTcH (Jul 19, 2007)

Well, most likely, the external hard drive wont draw power from the firewire cable. I meant disconnect the power cables to the things inside the computer.

Also, have you checked out the system log?


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## Buccura (Jul 20, 2007)

HaTcH said:
			
		

> Well, most likely, the external hard drive wont draw power from the firewire cable. I meant disconnect the power cables to the things inside the computer.
> 
> Also, have you checked out the system log?



Yes I have but so far I can't really see anything pertaining to it other than program errors that were fairly normal for my system. I did however for the first time notice that it gives me a brief blue screen of death before rebooting, so I'm starting to think that it is the Motherboard dying.


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## HaTcH (Jul 20, 2007)

Ah! You're getting a BSOD??

When windows restarts, does the error reporting thing appear? Saying something like "windows has recovered from a serious error"? Submit it to microsoft and then follow the blue link that appears in the next window. That'll have information about the 'Stop Error Code' you're BSOD was giving you.

If you don't get that error reporting window, its possible you have error reporting turned off. Lets turn it back on, and wait for it to happen again 

Control Panel>System>Advanced Tab> Click on 'Error Reporting' button.

If it is turned on, we can find the error another way. 
Start>Run> %SystemRoot%Minidump and hit enter.

Inside you should see .dmp files. Ok. Find the most recent one, right click on it, goto properties. Write down the 'Date Created' field. 

Now, go back to Start>Run and type in eventvwr.msc
Click on 'System' and then go by date to the time of that dmp file's creation. When you find it, double click it and read about the error you were getting. There may be a link inside the error event that you can follow which will help you figure out the problem and how to fix it.

When windows BSODs, you get something like http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/images/Windows_XP_BSOD.png which has the name of the error and a stop code. Using this information, you can goto the microsoft knowledge base and search it out.


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