IBM Hard Drives

[SandboxKing]

I recently purchased a IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40gig 7200 RPM hard drive from newegg.com and found nothing wrong with the drive at first. I was able to install Windows XP and have it run for a couple of days. Then, I started to get this weird problem where my computer would just restart on its own. It happened once in a while until yesterday when I couldn't even start up the OS. What's going on? Should I contact IBM and try and get a new drive? I also have a Epox 8hKA+. I think it's the hard drive not the mobo, but it could be the mobo....

 

[ShadowFox]

What are you doing when it restarts and why do you think it is the HD?

 

[arigato]

I think Tyan motherboards had an issue with rebooting spontaneously for some reason but I can't remember it off hand. Is yours a Tyan?

 

[cbuchach]

Doesn't necessarily sound like an HD issue. A computer restarting on its own usually is not an HD prob. I know with my machine when one of my HD's died, Windows was still up and the mouse could move but it was otherwise unresponsive.

 

[ku]

doesn't sound like a hard drive problem to me...

usually, when a computer restarts on it's own, it's the power supply. Check the power supply, make sure it's set correctly and try a new one.

also, it can be your motherboard. check the voltages. flash the bios. change the settings a bit.

i had a similar problem and it seemed to be the FSB i was running at. at this one mhz, the computer would just restart randomly. so I just upped it a little more and it was fine (although I had to lower my RAM settings)

 

[45kicks]

my friend had a problem with his computer randomly rebooting. his problem turned out to be his power supply was to weak. i am not sure what you are running but try to check that out.

 

[Tomek]

a bad hard drive wouldn't necessarily cause random reboots...definitely check the power supply

 

[veryape]

Random reboots generally equals a bad power supply, not always but most of the time.

 

[deejayshakur]

i'm not sure, but i know that win2k has an option to auto-restart after a blue screen... you have to disable it in order to reboot manually. perhaps that will help? dunno, but good luck... i'm looking to get a 60gxp soon...maybe.

 

[millsy]

There is an option in NT4, 2000 and XP to automatically reboot in startup and recovery options if there is a system failure.

 

[yazz]

yeah really... turn off the AUTOMATICALLY REBOOT on system failure in WIN2K/XP. now the system will not reboot on an OS error, plus the BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH (BSOD) will give you information on what happened to the system. i bet you are going to have to Change the role of your COMPUTER from ACPI to STANDARD PC in the Device Manager and then on the reboot go into the BIOS, disable ACPI and enable RESET DATA CONFIGURATION. i bet you have every device on one IRQ. doing this will let the BIOS control IRQ and I/O device assignments instead of Windows.
good luck....

 

[HappyPuppy]

IBM has a disk testing utility downloadable from its website. It will tell you if your HDD is bad or going bad. You would have to do this in order to RMA it anyway unless the drive is totally unresponsive.