My sister-in-law is running a 900mhz Athalon machine that had WinME (the devil) on it. It restarts when the OS splash screen comes up. When doing step-by-step confirmation loading of the OS, it restarts at *mouse* (don't remember the exact title). So, tried loading XP on it. After booting to cd, the initial "windows is inspecting..." message appears then the computer restarts.
It sat for over an hour on the safe mode boot options menu without restarting, so It's not an uptime issue.
It originally had 2 HDDs and 2 ODDs. Taking it down to 1 of each and removing all of the cards didn't help. Yes, the CPU fan is spinning. No, the BIOS doesn't have any sort of hardware monitor.
_________________ "There are too many forensics shows on TV." -Grissom, CSI
Does your motherboard support the memory you have on it?
I had a problem with an atholn xp chip that caused random reboots. The only thing that finally fixed it was disableing the L2 cache. Don't know why, but it worked.
You've already gotten a good start with some basic troubleshooting. The next thing I'd do is try to get a copy of memtest up and running. If you can, let it run for a while (overnight) to really check out your memory.
You may also want to feel the processor's heat sink after it has been running for a little while. If it is "burn you hot" there is a problem, but if it is just a little warm that's normal. As I recall Athlon 900's (i'm not sure if you have the socket a or the slot) run fairly warm. I remember the videos of them bursting in to flames when people removed their heatsinks while they were running.
Short of running memtest, and checking your temperatures (by touch), it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to check the voltages coming out of the psu. If that computer doesn't have any kind of hardware monitoring you can always throw it into another atx computer with monitoring capabilities and see if it checks out. If they are way out of spec it could be causing some problems.
If the processor temperature, memory, and voltages all check out you're going to have to really rip it apart and test each component individually. Throw the parts into a known working computer one at a time and see if they are fully functional. The only thing that will be really difficult to test out is the motherboard. I'd ask her about what she did with the computer recently to see if she can give you any clues about possible causes.
Oh, and this might sound stupid, but if it is dusty as hell (as old computers usually are) you might want to spray it out with a can of air. I've had a few computers start acting up when dust built up, but after a quick spray the airflow was restored and things started working as they should again.
If nothing else situations like this are usually a great time to upgrade...
You've already gotten a good start with some basic troubleshooting. The next thing I'd do is try to get a copy of memtest up and running. If you can, let it run for a while (overnight) to really check out your memory.
RAM is fine
Fattybuddha wrote:
You may also want to feel the processor's heat sink after it has been running for a little while.
cooler than my P4
Fattybuddha wrote:
I'd ask her about what she did with the computer recently to see if she can give you any clues about possible causes.
It sat for a couple of months unplugged and started doing this when put back into service.
Fattybuddha wrote:
you might want to spray it out with a can of air.
already did
Fattybuddha wrote:
If nothing else situations like this are usually a great time to upgrade...
$$$broke
_________________ "There are too many forensics shows on TV." -Grissom, CSI
Joined: Sun 08-24-2003 3:47PM Posts: 1049 Location: Behind YOU!
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Have you tried booting a Linux live distro?
How about SAFE Mode?
_________________ "Why is it that we must always choose between certain death and probable death?" ~ Clank, Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
i had that problem when the hard drive failed..... try resetting the hard drive jumpers. switching ata cables, swithcing ata ports. make sure the floppy is plugged in ( had that cause problems before) use a hard drive program to hard format it. ( writes all 0's)
i had that problem when the hard drive failed..... try resetting the hard drive jumpers. switching ata cables, swithcing ata ports. make sure the floppy is plugged in ( had that cause problems before) use a hard drive program to hard format it. ( writes all 0's)
Did all of that in the first 10 seconds.
_________________ "There are too many forensics shows on TV." -Grissom, CSI
This is a long shot, but you might want to visually check the capacitors on the motherboard to make sure they aren't burnt/leaking. I had an electrolyc cap burst and leak on my old motherboard, and it made it do all sorts of wierd things. (such as restarting and locking randomly)
Joined: Sun 03-31-2002 10:08PM Posts: 707 Location: Over your shoulder
Source: Off Campus
terminateprocess wrote:
This is a long shot, but you might want to visually check the capacitors on the motherboard to make sure they aren't burnt/leaking. I had an electrolyc cap burst and leak on my old motherboard, and it made it do all sorts of wierd things. (such as restarting and locking randomly)
i had that problem when the hard drive failed..... try resetting the hard drive jumpers. switching ata cables, swithcing ata ports. make sure the floppy is plugged in ( had that cause problems before) use a hard drive program to hard format it. ( writes all 0's)
Did all of that in the first 10 seconds.
A Low Level Format takes forever and a day to complete. I did a 200GB drive and it took hours. You probably just did a quick format which just erases the master file table....think of it as just tearing out the table of contents instead of taking a black sharpie to all the words in a book.
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I wouldn't be caught dead with a necropheliac... -- Ebay auction
If you know it isn't the processor, ram, hd, and you've removed all the pci cards you might want to check out e-bay for a new motherboard (maybe w/ cpu). You can probably get a "new" motherboard for like $30, and maybe upgrade the processor while you're at it.
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