Weird reboot... happened before... but on my new killer rig? DAMN!

[dcdomain]

Anyone ever pop in a cd in their burner, and suddenly the computer will reboot? I remember posting this before, but that was on my old rig, and I figured some stuff weren't right with it. But on my new machine? Damnit give me a break. I heard it was some stack overflow or whatever, and Windows just reboots itself...

The reboots happened when I had the 4.25 finals installed, no Via drivers installed, and 4.29 betas installed. All of them happened in Win2K.

Which leads me to this... if something's reading from your drive, say you are running a server, and it's not writing to the drive, but reading, will a reboot mess up the drive? I know that if you are writing and hard reboot in the middle of it, there's a chance for the drive to get messed up, but what about reading? Same heads or whatever?

 

[dcdomain]

Damnit, this just happened twice on me in less than 30 minutes. I want to get to the bottom of this and prevent this from happening again because I just lost an image file I've been working on all day (forgot to save AT ALL... stupid me). So anyway, after the first time it rebooted, I started over on my image file, and luckily saved most of it before it rebooted again.

Again, it's with the burner or dvd-rom, this is around the 4th or 5th occasion this has happened. Everytime, it rebooted right after I placed either a blank cd (most of the time) or a cd into the burner or dvd rom. I figured it might be because it starts reading the burner for the title of the cd to display and then when I pop in another cd in the dvd rom, the os chokes.

Someone told me it was a memory dump a while before, but can someone explain further as to what it is? And how I can avoid it in the future? This crap is pissing me off...

 

[Guvvy]

Make sure it's not purely a mechanical failure - like the reset button is being jiggled when you insert a disc.

Guv

 

[dcdomain]

Good insight, but nope, the reset button needs to be pushed by a pen to work, and it's way below the drives... thanks for trying though.

 

[Vinny N]

ugh...I see your motherboard is a Pro2A...there was someone else reporting the same problem with their burner and the person seemed to think it had to do with the Pro2A. Most people seem to think that the little kinks can be worked out by trying different VIA drivers. So why don't you add such info to your post Also, what OS were you in at the time? Your rig profile says you're dual booting ME and 2000.

 

[dcdomain]

Thanks for the suggestions. The reboots happened when I had the 4.25 finals installed, no Via drivers installed, and 4.29 betas installed. All of them happened in Win2K. Thanks for taking time looking through my rig profile...

 

[rbV5]

Have you checked your ASPI layer? use this tool to check it aspiChk and then repair it with forceAspi That may not be it at all, but improper ASPI layers are common on win2k and hard to diagnose, worth a try!

 

[MadRat]

I had that when my HP8210 burner was in PIO mode. Try UDMA.

 

[alkemyst]

forceaspi is bad on that link...invalid archive.

 

[alkemyst]

Try here for ForceASPIv1.7

 

[Kaan]

hmmm....works fine for me. Maybe it was just temporarily down

 

[dcdomain]

ASPI layer is ok, and everything is in DMA... I was thinking last night, could it be a power problem? Definitely not a heating problem, I've experienced magic reboots when the temperature got too hot. But could it be a power problem? I'm making the burner and dvd rom both spin up at around the same time? I figured the Antec 300w powersupply was good enough...

 

[MadRat]

It may not be the powersupply as much as the load on one individual channel. Use a different powerplug for the CDRW, its own preferably. The other thing to check is ventilation around the CDRW.

 

[dcdomain]

Ah... the load on the individual channel... good insight. Can someone verify this? Basically, I can't really fix it huh? I don't want my two harddrives on separate channels, I'll just have to be careful about loading discs from now on I guess. Wish I had the TURBO, make everything its own master drive...

 

[MadRat]

Powersupply channels and IDE channels are TWO mutually exclusive ideas.

Unplug the power to the CDRW and use one of the other cables. Then see if that power connecter can handle the load. Your powersupply may be overheating because its pulling too much power. Or your CDRW may be overheating because its putting out too much heat...

 

[Phil21]

I second the PS emotion, although I doubt a "channel" on the PS is overloaded. IIRC they all solder into the same place anyways, and that 24(?) gauge wire isn't about to start resisting that much.

Was this the same PS as the old system that had the problem? Some mobo's are FAR finickier than others when it comes to power. Man. We had a server that had a Tyan Thunder 100 in it, and it mysteriously would just shut off, and not come back. wtf? If I unplugged it for about 3 hours it would turn back on, and then anywhere from 5min to 2 hours shut back off/reboot again. I figured it was the mobo, and bought a Thunderbolt ($500 mobo). Seemed to work fine, so I put it back in the datacenter. After 60 some days of perfect reliability, it damn thing failed again. I just wouldn't turn back on, same problem as before. Finally ripped out the PS and replaced it, and I've not had a problem since. Put the Thunder back into a machine with a different PS, and guess what? Works perfectly!#@!$

The bad PS I took out, I then put in my home system w/ an Abit bx6r2. The Abit HATED this PS, and was FAR more finicky than the Tyan boards (perhaps less capactitance in the CPU bank?), and I ruled the PS to be the absolute end-all problem.

So, do you have another PS you can try? Strange issues like this I would look at the PS as one of the first culperates if the normal stuff checks out, after that insane time I had troubleshooting my PS problems.

I dunno, hope my hair-pulling experience helps you out!

-Phil

 

[Conroy9]

does load on a power supply channel make sense? doesn't it all eventually branch into the power supply at a single point?

since you're in windows 2000, you should try setting the startup/recovery options to NOT automatically reboot on crash; that way you will be able to see whether it's spontaneously rebooting or if something is bluescreening windows 2000

 

[dcdomain]

Whoops my bad, that's what I get for reading too quickly. Or not reading carefully enough. Along the lines of the IDE channel problem, I thought since I heard that only one device could be accessed at one time, so I thought if both were spinning up at around the same time, and data was trying to be accessed from both drives at once on the same channel, the machine would choke and reboot. Like if I copy from a harddrive to another on the same channel, someone told me the mobo will take a mb or some similar unit from the host drive and copy that to the destination drive, and repeat the process until the transfer was done...

The 'magic' reboot happened once on my old Dell pentium II 300mhz machine. It might have been the same CDRW (my TDK)... I'll try switching the power channels and the Win2K startup/recovery option later tonight after work.

Thanks for the help guys...

 

[Nih]

If you're using Hotburn, It's Hotburn

 

[dcdomain]

Guess I'm not, I don't know what Hotburn is...

 

[jhouston]

Are you using Direct CD from Adaptec?

 

[dcdomain]

Nah, don't have that installed, I do have EZ CD creator though, but the last two reboots happened with CloneCD on... don't think it's a software error.

 

[dcdomain]

Wow these random reboots are becoming second nature to me. Just an hour ago, I popped in a blank cd, getting ready to burn an audio cd, and right after I closed the drive by, I went and saved the current file I was working on in Photoshop and Dreamweaver, and right after I finished saving, the computer magically rebooted.

And it's definitely not a burner software error. When I placed my blank cd in, I had no burner software running at all.

 

[Nih]

Sounds like a power supply problem

 

[igiveup]

Ok. Is your firmware up to date on you cd-rw? I know my lightspeed 16x had problems till I went to the "h" firmware level. Are your drivers good on the CD-RW? I would get the latest ones and reinstall them. Might be some corruption or something. Even if you have the latest ones, still re-install.

What does your event viewer tell you? I don't know if it would have time to write an event to the log if it reboots so quickly but you can at least look for it.