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Random restarts, slow windows loading, and more...

R

robiob

Junior Member
Hello. I'm new to these forums and hoping that someone will be able to help me with a computer problem that I am having.


My specs:

Soyo P4VDA motherboard
Pentium 4 2.26Ghz 533FSB
512MB PC2700 DDR
nVidia Geforce 4 Ti4400
Antec 400Watt PSU
Maxtor 60GB HDD
WD 80GB HDD
WD 180GB HDD
Promise Ultra100 TX2 ATA controller card
HP CD-RW drive
And for what it's worth, generic floppy drive, 3 80mm case fans, and a cathode.

The 60GB drive is for my winXP OS. The ATA card is used with the 180GB drive because my mobo does not support drives of that size.

Now on to my problems:

It all started a few weeks ago when my computer refused to boot, claiming that some system file had been damaged. A format and reinstall fixed it for a week or so, but then it happened again. During this week, I had witnessed a few instances where the computer would mysteriously reboot itself for no reason. Deciding that there was something majorly wrong, I went to work sorting my media and mp3 files so that I could back them up on CD-Rs. I have multiple hard drives, and during the time that I was sorting and moving the roughly 20GB of files between drives, I experienced 3 of these reboots within an hour, followed by another refusal to boot. I concluded that there was something wrong with one of the drives, but I was able to copy the entire contents of each drive to another computer without any real problems. One of the drives had some corrupt files, but I'm assuming that was caused by a reboot happening while data was being written. I then decided that it could be my ATA controller card, so I pulled it out. This seems to have stopped the random rebooting,but the question is why was it doing this in the first place and what can I do to get it to work again?

At the same time that the random reboots started, I began seeing some other odd stuff as well. It mostly appeared in the form of general instability. I expect a clean install of XP to run for at least a few weeks before it's first freeze, but this time I have instability issues right from the start. One thing in particular that is bugging me is that when I reboot, XP will load the start menu and desktop, as well as the "safely remove hardware" icon in the tool tray and then just stop for roughly 2 minutes before proceeding to load the rest of the icons like AIM and my pop-up stopper. It has been doing this for the last two installs of XP, so I have no reason to think that reinstalling windows will help.

What do you guys think? Are these problems separate issues, or are they both somehow related? What should I do?

Thanks for your help.


Rob
 
Are you over clocking? Memory timings set too aggressively? Have run memtest86? (You want at least 10+ passes with zero errors).
 
I have done no overclocking at all. I reset my BIOS yesterday and loaded the optimized default settings, so everything should be pretty standardized. I flashed it with the most recent BIOS revision while I was at it as well. I don't know what memtest86 is, but I'll google it in a minute and give it a spin.
 
have you tried running the system with just the boot drive and no pci cards or other non-essential devices?
what are your idle cpu temps? voltage rails?
what operating system are you using?
is the machine hooked up to a ups or surge protector, or the wall?
 
My last install of XP was done on a minimal system. I forgot to unplug my USB devices, but I didn't install drivers for any of them, so I don't think that will make any difference. I didn't add drivers for onboard sound, networking or anything like that either. XP still had that odd delay before loading everything, but there was no random rebooting. It seems that it only reboots when moving files to or from a drive attached to that ATA controller card.

My motherboard monitor software reports that the CPU temp is 39C. THe 5V rail is 4.94 and the 12V rail is 11.71. And I don't know what these mean, but Vcore is 1.42, VCC2.5 is 2.49 and VCC3 is 3.21.

For my OS, I dual boot win98 and XP. I rarely use 98, so I don't know how it is behaving, but XP is really being a pain.

The system is hooked into a surge protector. It cost me $30, so it should be decent quality and it still claims to still be working.

Actually, now that you mentioned surge protectors, it occurs to me that there was a power failure just about the same time as these problems began. I don't know what happened, but when the power came back on, XP had reverted from the nice rounded interface back to the old square windows and the place where you go to change between the two did not list an option to set it back. I had assumed that something in the registry got messed up, but maybe it was worse than that? I guess that was the point when windows got buggy.
 
Originally posted by: robiob
My last install of XP was done on a minimal system. I forgot to unplug my USB devices, but I didn't install drivers for any of them, so I don't think that will make any difference. I didn't add drivers for onboard sound, networking or anything like that either. XP still had that odd delay before loading everything, but there was no random rebooting. It seems that it only reboots when moving files to or from a drive attached to that ATA controller card.

My motherboard monitor software reports that the CPU temp is 39C. THe 5V rail is 4.94 and the 12V rail is 11.71. And I don't know what these mean, but Vcore is 1.42, VCC2.5 is 2.49 and VCC3 is 3.21.

For my OS, I dual boot win98 and XP. I rarely use 98, so I don't know how it is behaving, but XP is really being a pain.

The system is hooked into a surge protector. It cost me $30, so it should be decent quality and it still claims to still be working.

Actually, now that you mentioned surge protectors, it occurs to me that there was a power failure just about the same time as these problems began. I don't know what happened, but when the power came back on, XP had reverted from the nice rounded interface back to the old square windows and the place where you go to change between the two did not list an option to set it back. I had assumed that something in the registry got messed up, but maybe it was worse than that? I guess that was the point when windows got buggy.
Click to expand...


I'd run it for a while without the USB device attached and see if some of the problems go away. And I'd definitely download the latest drivers for the ATA card and possibly for the USB devices too.
 
Originally posted by: DieHardware

I'd run it for a while without the USB device attached and see if some of the problems go away. And I'd definitely download the latest drivers for the ATA card and possibly for the USB devices too.
Click to expand...

I thought that you only needed drivers for the ATA card if it was going to control a bootable drive. I'm using it purely for data storage. I threw the card in, hooked up the drive and when I turned the system on, during the POST, it did a little thing where it detected any drives on the card. And once I had formatted it, windows saw the drive too, so I assumed I was in good shape. Am I wrong?


Regardless, the card is not in my system right now, and windows is still not behaving normally. Every time I restart, it takes almost exactly 2 minutes to finish loading the tool bar apps. And I just realized that it continues to inform me about its policy about hiding inactive items on the task bar. Every time I reboot, it tells me all over again, like it forgot that it already told me last time.
 
hmmm. have you tried running a full chkdsk on the drive to make sure there are no problems with the file structure?
It's starting to sound like a problem with your registry and/or a problem with your swap files or a problem with a descriptor of some kind. It could also be something being loaded on startup causing the slow loading, try using msconfig and removing items from start up that you recognize and rarely/never use. I would also try running it strait from a wall socket for a little while, as sometimes surge protectors can flake out if they were hit with fluctuating line conditions and not trip the breaker/fuse and cause intermittant problems with your power supply.
and the place where you go to change between the two did not list an option to set it back.
Click to expand...
just out curiosity you are looking at the display properties under appearance and talking about the drop down menu where it switches between windows classic and windows xp styles right?
 
Ok, guys. Unplugging my USB devices had no noticeable effect, but as I was unplugging them, I realized that my network cable was still plugged in. (It's integrated w/ the mobo, not a separate card which is why I forgot to unplug it) Anyway, with that cord unplugged, the tool bar apps loaded in around 25 seconds. I then plugged it back in and installed the correct drivers for it and I knocked another 5 secs off the load time. I think it used to be faster,but it could be that I just never noticed the delay before. Either way, it's more tolerable than the 2 minute delay that I was seeing.
 
Originally posted by: robiob
Originally posted by: DieHardware

I'd run it for a while without the USB device attached and see if some of the problems go away. And I'd definitely download the latest drivers for the ATA card and possibly for the USB devices too.
Click to expand...

I thought that you only needed drivers for the ATA card if it was going to control a bootable drive. I'm using it purely for data storage. I threw the card in, hooked up the drive and when I turned the system on, during the POST, it did a little thing where it detected any drives on the card. And once I had formatted it, windows saw the drive too, so I assumed I was in good shape. Am I wrong?


Regardless, the card is not in my system right now, and windows is still not behaving normally. Every time I restart, it takes almost exactly 2 minutes to finish loading the tool bar apps. And I just realized that it continues to inform me about its policy about hiding inactive items on the task bar. Every time I reboot, it tells me all over again, like it forgot that it already told me last time.
Click to expand...

You've been using the built in WinXP driver, which if it's a Promise/Maxtor ATA100 card, sucks. One of my PC's has a burner connected to a Promise ATA100 card. Every time I tried to burn more than one disk using Nero, the PC would lockup solid when using the built in driver. Downloading and installing the latest driver solved it.
 
Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong
hmmm. have you tried running a full chkdsk on the drive to make sure there are no problems with the file structure?
Click to expand...

I ran chkdsk and it said no bad sectors and that the file system was ok. I don't know much about the command though. Is there a parameter to do a more complete scan?


Originally posted by: lobadobadingdong

just out curiosity you are looking at the display properties under appearance and talking about the drop down menu where it switches between windows classic and windows xp styles right?
Click to expand...

Yes, that is correct. That was fixed however when I formatted the drive and reinstalled the OS. I just thought it was worth mentioning because it was odd.
 
from a command prompt use the /r switch to do a complete check (5 stage instead of 3 stage) with repair.
....and if the option to use the xp style was missing, you definatly had some file corruption.
edit: is the system still unstable, or just booting slow.
 
I ran the complete chkdsk on the 80GB drive and it reported no problems at all. It won't let me run it on the drive with the OS and wanted to schedule it for the next reboot time. I did this, but the results did not stay on the screen long enough for me to read them. Is there any log that was created that I could refer to? Next, I took the 180gig drive and hooked it up to a newer computer with an Abit IS7-E mobo in it, so it should be able to read the drive correctly without an ultra ATA card, right? I'm assuming it can handle the drive because it reported its size correctly. Running chkdsk on it revealed:

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)...
File verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 5)...
Index verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 5)...
Security descriptor verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying file data (stage 4 of 5)...
File data verification completed.
CHKDSK is verifying free space (stage 5 of 5)...
Free space verification is complete.
Adding 10401421 bad clusters to the Bad Clusters File.
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap.
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

175815328 KB total disk space.
30642684 KB in 5432 files.
2064 KB in 381 indexes.
41605684 KB in bad sectors.
77176 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
103487720 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
43953832 total allocation units on disk.
25871930 allocation units available on disk.

That looks like an awfully large number of bad sectors. Will a format fix this, or is something physically wrong with the drive? Or am I wrong about this mobo being able to handle a drive this big, and it is simply reporting incorrect information?
 
I just remembered that the 180GB WD drive came with some diagnostic software, so I used it to run an extended test, (with the drive still in the other newer computer) which took over an hour, so it had better be a very complete scan. It reported NO errors at all! There is a big difference between 0 bad sectors and 41605684 bad sectors. What is up with that? Which do I trust?

My system is currently still running with just the bare minumum of peripherals. The boot time is within an accepptable range, and as far as I can tell, everything is stable. But as we all know, instability can take days or even weeks to become visible sometimes. I guess if everything still seems ok in a few more days, I'll start slowly adding parts back in and try to find some newer drivers for them.

 
I just partitioned that 180G drive into two 90Gig partitions and once again ran chkdsk on them. It reported zero bad sectors on the first partition, and ~40000000K of them on the second. It's not exactly the same number as before, but it's very close. I didnt' write it down, but it was just a few hundred K different. What does that mean? Does XP's chkdsk not support drives over 137Gigs possibly?
 
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