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Computer Crashing spontaneously


rendrag

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A buddy of mine has a computer which is spontaneously crashing on him every so often. at first I thought it was temperatures which caused an auto shutdown, but now i'm not so sure.

Now it's just shutting off every 10-20 minutes, and sometimes, when he reboots, he gets the following screen:

CPU Temp: 47c/116f

System Fan Speed: 1622 RPM

3.3(v): 3.31v

+12 (v): 12.16v

-5(v): -4.99v

CPU Fan Speed: 2812 RPM

CPU voltage: 1.74v

+5(v): 4.94

-12(v):-12.36

Verifying DMI Pool Data.....

Boot from Atapi CD-Rom.....

Boot from Atapi CD-Rom.....

DISK BOOT FAILURE; INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I know the CPU temp is a tad high, but it is def not high enough to cause this crash...

my initial thought is that the hard drive is bad, however if he reboots a couple times, he gets past the diskboot failure and it loads windows OK.

The strange thing is that he's left it running all weekend and it's never crashed, but if he uses it, it will crash hard on him.

What y'all think? I've suggested he back up his data to be safe, but any headway into what could be causing these reboots would be sweet.

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couple of things i could say

1. a 40pin cable sometimes causes that (disk boot), yea it does!

2. a bad ram might be causing the crash but not the disk boot,

so get a 80pin ata cable..

also if i were u i'd increase the system fan speed. is he/she using amd?

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I'm pretty sure he's using the 80 pin cable, but I'll doublecheck that.

using AMD proc, the system fan speed is thermally controlled by the power supply, so I'll see about hooking it to a regular molex connector.

Strange is that the computer has run for about 2.5 years without a hitch, and now it's running into problems.

Thanks for the help, and if anyone wants to chime in, go for it.

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Open Event Viewer and check to see if anything is logged in there.

Start>Run>eventvwr.msc

My first guess is the memory, bad ram will cause the system to randomly die.

Also though the temp isnt "too high" maybe the kill switch is set low? And I doubt this applies but I've met people who aimed space heaters at themselves and their computers :whistle:

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Open Event Viewer and check to see if anything is logged in there.

Start>Run>eventvwr.msc

My first guess is the memory, bad ram will cause the system to randomly die.

Also though the temp isnt "too high" maybe the kill switch is set low?  And I doubt this applies but I've met people who aimed space heaters at themselves and their computers  :whistle:

that's right... i completely forgot about event viewer

I know he doesn't have a space heater pointing at his computer :P

I'll also have him check the killswitch. I think the lowest I've ever any kill switch set to is 50'C, so I'll have him check that.

I've never heard of bad ram causing a boot disk failure, but I guess there's a first for everything

Thanks for the help

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use memcheck to check the rams

i have experienced this problem it was okay after changing to 80pin it appeared all of a sudden. i dunno.. but get mem check

also 1 other thing i think i had created a 8mb partition at the beginning of the hdd, thinking it might be defected.. well whatever it was its working now. sorry i cannot give u "do this and it'll be okay" kind of exact answer bc i run into lots of problems and do several things, but well try these :D

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A buddy of mine has a computer which is spontaneously crashing on him every so often. at first I thought it was temperatures which caused an auto shutdown, but now i'm not so sure.

Now it's just shutting off every 10-20 minutes, and sometimes, when he reboots, he gets the following screen:

CPU Temp: 47c/116f

System Fan Speed: 1622 RPM

3.3(v): 3.31v

+12 (v): 12.16v

-5(v): -4.99v

CPU Fan Speed: 2812 RPM

CPU voltage: 1.74v

+5(v): 4.94

-12(v):-12.36

Verifying DMI Pool Data.....

Boot from Atapi CD-Rom.....

Boot from Atapi CD-Rom.....

DISK BOOT FAILURE; INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER

I know the CPU temp is a tad high, but it is def not high enough to cause this crash...

my initial thought is that the hard drive is bad, however if he reboots a couple times, he gets past the diskboot failure and it loads windows OK.

The strange thing is that he's left it running all weekend and it's never crashed, but if he uses it, it will crash hard on him.

What y'all think? I've suggested he back up his data to be safe, but any headway into what could be causing these reboots would be sweet.

Hi,

I had this same problem a few months back and I found it was the sound card driver that was in conflict and would cause the computer to crash or reboot.

So your friend might wish to check all drivers. I bet he might find it could be that.

Hope it helps,

Dakota SunRunner :P

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