Any input is highly welcome here. I've done oodles of troubleshooting and my results are below. I'd really like to know if anyone has ever had a problem similar to this one.
The Problem:
My 4 year old computer randomly restarts itself out of the blue. And when I say restart I mean it doesn't even give a blue screen or a freeze. It just goes black, the normal BIOS beep goes off I see the BIOS boot up as normal. Then it boots back into Windows XP. Lately the random restart intervals are getting shorter and shorter allowing me to spend less time in Windows.
Viruses are not a possibility. I've scanned and rescanned with Avast and I never, ever open random attachments. I'm extremely careful and aware of potential viruses.
Steps I've taken:
1. I tried using a different 8mb Video Card instead of my 128mb Fx5200. The problem kept happening.
2. Since I have two 512mb sticks of memory, I tried booting only with one at a time. The problem kept happening with both and MemTest came back error-free as well.
3. My old 30gb Maxtor hardrive comes back as "bad" in S.M.A.R.T. but I recall it doing that about a year ago and then going away. I ran several tests on the hardrive using Maxtor utilities and various 3rd party utilities. All came back ok. I tried putting in a new 80gb Western Digital after cloning the image over but Windows refused to boot. It only made it as far as the Windows recovery screen (choose Safe Mode, etc) and then the restart immediately started again. And yes, I have the active partition and jumpers set correctly. I even tried reinstalling Windows XP onto this new 80gb hardrive but I cannot. I kept getting Stop 0x000000a5, 0x0000008e, and 0x00000050 errors halfway through the install at various points.
My thoughts:
At this point all that's left is the motherboard, processor and maybe the hardrive. Any thoughts or additional tests that you think may be useful?
The Equipment
ECS K7S5A Motherboard
AMD 2000 Processor
Two 512mb sticks of PC2100 Spectek memory
Chaintech 128mb FX5200 Video Card
Maxtor 30gb 7200 HDD (old one)
WD 80gb 7200 HDD (temp one)
Windows XP Pro with SP1
The Problem:
My 4 year old computer randomly restarts itself out of the blue. And when I say restart I mean it doesn't even give a blue screen or a freeze. It just goes black, the normal BIOS beep goes off I see the BIOS boot up as normal. Then it boots back into Windows XP. Lately the random restart intervals are getting shorter and shorter allowing me to spend less time in Windows.
Viruses are not a possibility. I've scanned and rescanned with Avast and I never, ever open random attachments. I'm extremely careful and aware of potential viruses.
Steps I've taken:
1. I tried using a different 8mb Video Card instead of my 128mb Fx5200. The problem kept happening.
2. Since I have two 512mb sticks of memory, I tried booting only with one at a time. The problem kept happening with both and MemTest came back error-free as well.
3. My old 30gb Maxtor hardrive comes back as "bad" in S.M.A.R.T. but I recall it doing that about a year ago and then going away. I ran several tests on the hardrive using Maxtor utilities and various 3rd party utilities. All came back ok. I tried putting in a new 80gb Western Digital after cloning the image over but Windows refused to boot. It only made it as far as the Windows recovery screen (choose Safe Mode, etc) and then the restart immediately started again. And yes, I have the active partition and jumpers set correctly. I even tried reinstalling Windows XP onto this new 80gb hardrive but I cannot. I kept getting Stop 0x000000a5, 0x0000008e, and 0x00000050 errors halfway through the install at various points.
My thoughts:
At this point all that's left is the motherboard, processor and maybe the hardrive. Any thoughts or additional tests that you think may be useful?
The Equipment
ECS K7S5A Motherboard
AMD 2000 Processor
Two 512mb sticks of PC2100 Spectek memory
Chaintech 128mb FX5200 Video Card
Maxtor 30gb 7200 HDD (old one)
WD 80gb 7200 HDD (temp one)
Windows XP Pro with SP1
lol...unfortunately no. But soon it may. I thought it might be the power supply also. I remember when I first purchased the K7S5a I had to upgrade the PSU to 500w to accomodate this thirsty mobo. Maybe it's reached it's life span as well.
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