Can a bad HDD trigger the system to intermittently just "go blank" or should I finger the PSU?

[CZroe]

This HP P4 Northwood system someone asked me to look at has been running fine for days... no hint of the problem she brought it to me for. The problem was that it would just "go blank" as soon as she tries to actually do something with it, like launch a program or check email.

Sure enough, just as I'm ready to give it back to her after cleaning, updating, and tweaking, it blanks out as soon as I start a final malware scan. The power light stayed on with no drive activity but the screen was completely black. I restarted and the scan completed as normal.

I'm reluctant to finger the PSU because I have been doing intensive operations for days and it has remained stable and "on" for me, but I checked the SMART drive health with CrystalDiskInfo and it reported "Caution" under Health Status (253 reallocated sectors; threshold is 63). All capacitors on the board look fine, but this is still the kinda thing I'd suspect the PSU for first and foremost. That said, all the similar PSUs on newegg are poorly rated with reports of low life expectancy, so before I order one, I'd like to see if this is a common manifestation of a drive going bad. I mean, rather than blanking the screen and suspending drive operations, wouldn't a sector reallocation manifest as a write error, read error, or a simple delay while the drive secretly does it's thing?

 

[elconejito]

I had a computer randomly reboot on me for no reason that i could figure. I suspected heat, PSU, bad RAM, everything. On a whim I checked the drive with WD Diagnostics and it immediately popped up with a fail, SMART info wouldn't load. Note, that it passed regular checkdisk in windows. Replaced the drive and it's been fine ever since.

Not to say that it's not a PSU or other issue, but I wouldn't rule out the hard drive...

 

[alkalinetaupehat]

Originally posted by: CZroe
I'm reluctant to finger the PSU because I have been doing intensive operations for days and it has remained stable and "on" for me...

Nice fetish.

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: elconejito
I had a computer randomly reboot on me for no reason that i could figure. I suspected heat, PSU, bad RAM, everything. On a whim I checked the drive with WD Diagnostics and it immediately popped up with a fail, SMART info wouldn't load. Note, that it passed regular checkdisk in windows. Replaced the drive and it's been fine ever since.

Not to say that it's not a PSU or other issue, but I wouldn't rule out the hard drive...

Thanks. Come to think of it, a friend had a really unstable system that was ultimately found to be caused by a bad Raptor drive. The system would randomly reboot or freeze and show graphical corruption (flashing system characters), even during windows installation (different points during installation). It wouldn't have taken nearly as long to diagnose if the RAID didn't check out "A-OK" repeatedly.

Originally posted by: alkalinetaupehat

Originally posted by: CZroe
I'm reluctant to finger the PSU because I have been doing intensive operations for days and it has remained stable and "on" for me...

Nice fetish.

I'll be sure to "finger" you in a line-up... pervert.

 

[taltamir]

1. is the SCREEN going blank or is the COMPUTER CRASHING?
2. could your video card be crashing? do you have windows vista or higher on there? (vista and 7 can reboot the video card only and restart the driver when it crashes, rather then have the whole system freeze).

 

[CZroe]

Originally posted by: taltamir
1. is the SCREEN going blank or is the COMPUTER CRASHING?
2. could your video card be crashing? do you have windows vista or higher on there? (vista and 7 can reboot the video card only and restart the driver when it crashes, rather then have the whole system freeze).

The screen goes blank and all HDD activity halts immediately. The system does not respond to soft-off or keyboard/mouse (requires holding power for several seconds). No PC speaker beeps from the stack queuing up with keyboard presses either. When it happens it happens instantaneously... no sluggish or non-responsive behavior beforehand. That said, it usually happens right when starting something intensive (virus scan, application launch, etc).

It's XP on an older P4. Regardless, I've been saying that Vista needed a way to do that since before it went gold and never found out how. It should be as well-known as CTRL-ALT-DEL. How do I do reinitialize video in Vista? Personally, I usually use Remote Desktop to log in and put it to sleep/wake it up or save everything and shut it down proper, but that's not an option for other people's installations (they can't all enable it even if they wanted due to arbitrary restrictions on different flavors of Vista).