Reply to: rebooting computer

[Platypus]

Thanks guys.

Seems to be completely buggered now. It tells me it's missing a system file and wont boot up at all.

Then, probably the hard-drive starting to fail. Western Digital?

You could replace the hard-drive and do a fresh install of Windows.

I've taken the disk out and put it in an external box and it seems to be OK, so I've lost nothing of importance

Glad to hear it!

[eliquant]

To me it "sounds" like the CPU may be overheating, check its temperature with the BIOS or a special tool (87 degrees celcious is very hot and shut down will ensue).

I didn't read all the history of this problem but if the computer restarts say after
afew minutes of a stone cold machine boot it could be the CPU overheating.

[tim123]

Thanks guys.

Seems to be completely buggered now. It tells me it's missing a system file and wont boot up at all.

Now that I've recovered my laptop from my sister's (long story) I am back online. I've taken the disk out and put it in an external box and it seems to be OK, so I've lost nothing of importance.

Churchill might have been right about the heat sink. It was full of dust. but it's too late now.

Anyone want an unused DVD writer!

tim

[Churchill]

My computer keeps on rebooting itself.

Is there some diagnostics program somewhere I can use to find out why?

I've got XP.

(and yes I will take this as a hint that I should buy a new one but I can't do that quickly ATM)

TIA

tim

When was the last time you hoovered all the tulip out of your PC?

Blocked heatsinks can cause major overheating problem which can cause a reboot.

Apologies if someone else posted this but I can't be arsed reading the rest of the thread.

[Board Game Geek]

Get something like Bart's Boot Disk, burn to CD, and then boot from CD.

You'll then have boot time windows installation that runs in RAM, and you can use the various tools on the CD to try to repair the HDD.

[PingPing]

If you can't find your system CD you could use a linux CD (like SystemRescueCD) to make a mirror image of your current (faulty) hard drive and put it on a different (non-faulty) hard drive.

I'm assuming you know how to use linux, right? If not, now is as good a time as any to start learning some basic linux skills. The abovecaptioned link contains a lot of documentation that will hold your hand through the process. Don't be fooled into the amateurish nature of the web site - the SystemRescueCD is a very powerful distribution of linux and may save you a lot of agro in the future should you come across similar hardware/data problems.

[Sysman]

It refuses to do that because "it can't check the disk that system files are on whilst windows is running".

Do you have more than one disk? If so you can put a minimal installation of Windows on another disk, and boot from that to repair your current C:

It would seriously help if you can find your system CD.

[tim123]

Right click the C: drive, then choose properties.
Click on Tools tab, click Check Now button.
Select both options (Fix filesystem errors and find/fix bad sectors).

Hopefully it'll mark the bad sectors and avoid accessing them in future.

It refuses to do that because "it can't check the disk that system files are on whilst windows is running".

It says that it marks the disk for a check the next time the computer starts, but this disk check at startup fails to complete (and thus doesn't mark the bad blocks)

I think that I'm stuffed with that computer and am going to have to scrap it

(thanks)

tim

[Platypus]

Right click the C: drive, then choose properties.
Click on Tools tab, click Check Now button.
Select both options (Fix filesystem errors and find/fix bad sectors).

Hopefully it'll mark the bad sectors and avoid accessing them in future.

[RSoles]

chkdsk /F ?

[tim123]

Hopefully bumping this back to the top will get some more help

It appears to be a faulty disk!

It seems that where the system info for one of my users is located is bad and that it now repeatedly crashes when this is accessed.

So I can't log on as that user, but I can log on as one of the other users without incident. (Fortunately I created a copy of my user when this problem started.)

However, every time I turn on it notices this faulty disk and wants to do a scan, which results in an "unspecified error" and refuses to correct the problem.

Is there anyway that I can get it to "fix this? (I accept that I'm going to lose some data, but I've lost it anyway!)

BTW I can't find my system CD (If I ever had one!)

tim


tim

[Addanc]

Most probably the power supply.

[BoredBloke]

Mine used to do this. I bought some expensive and fast memory but didn't realise that you had to up the voltage. So when I ran memory tests the sencond stick appreared to fail presumably because it was being starved. So when I put any load on the box it would fall over. The shop where I bought the memory from said that they advise people not to use 2 sticks of this memory for that reason. They didn't know ablout the voltage thing. Once I increased the voltage it stopped the random reboots.

[Jaws]

I once had a similar problem, it was due to overheating - there was loads of dust on the CPU fan. Once the dust was removed it never happened again.

[Cliphead]

I had the same problem some time ago which turned out to be the power supply gradually failing.

Does it reboot itself when running in safe mode?