Random Rebooting Getting Progressively Worse

[CKDragon]

So last week my girlfriend's hard drive crapped out. The only surprise was that it didn't happen sooner considering it was one of the early IBM Deathstars. So I grabbed one of my spare 80 gig Maxtors and formatted it for her and the installation of WinXP at first went swimmingly and the peasants rejoiced.

Then in an effort to save her old mp3s and documents, I plugged the old deathstar in as a slave drive thinking that even though the drive couldn't be used to boot anymore that maybe I could still access some of the directories. Upon booting up with both drives attached, CHKDSK ran and it crashed in the middle of it. I had to hard reboot the computer by holding in the power button for 5 seconds. I decided to cut my losses and tell her that her files were lost for good. No big deal.

After taking the drive out and trying to boot with only one hard drive, the computer would crash within 5 minutes of getting to the windows desktop. Around this time I booted into safe mode and the computer seemed to be running fine for about 30 minutes. Then for a couple of restarts the booting process only made it Windows XP login screen that lists the user name. And finally, a couple of restarts later, IF THE COMPUTER CAN EVEN MANAGE TO POST, it will crash 100% of the time before I even get the option to start in Safe Mode.

If anyone can help me at all, I would greatly appreciate it. I'm going crazy with this thing.

Thank you so much for your time,

CK

 

[mechBgon]

Hmm, a few thoughts:

• If this system is Deathstar-vintage, it probably doesn't have advanced thermal-protection features. Is it possible that the CPU fan is 1) unplugged by accident, or 2) has a wire caught in the fan and is unable to rotate? Simple recipe for overheated CPU, simple solution.
• Oftentimes random reboots are a symptom of a power supply that's flaking out due to age, low quality or overload. Got any healthy PSUs that are powerful enough to be suitable for this system, to test with at least?
• Any chance you've got viruses? You did hitch up Ye Olde Drive...

Good luck, hope something comes to light

 

[buckmasterson]

It's rare, but a flaky PCI or ISA card will also cause random reboots.

Also, did the machine have XP on it the first time? Did you load SP1?

 

[UMfanatic]

viruses can definitely cause random reboots, so can errors caused by many of things
bad sectors, corrupted files, heck I had bad sectors that caused one of my old harddrives to reformat itself while I was on vacation in Germany; mind you my computer was off the entire time I was gone.