Win XP pro random reboots.....

[soulburner]

Have you disbled absolutley everything except the bare essentials. I mean unplug your Optical drives diable your USB in BIOS, unplug your floppy, disable audio card, anything else.

Just boot up with HDD, Video, mouse keyboard, then see if the symptoms are still there if so start troubleshooting what is left.

if you have a spare CPU swap it, if that doesn't fix it put original back in.

If you have a spare memory put it in if that doesn't fix it put the original back in.

Next swap HDD's if that doesn't fix it put the original back in.

Then try video card if that doesn't fix it what else could it be except motherboard or PSU.

I am not sure if you have these spare parts lying around maybe you have a freind willing to let you borrow parts from their computer. Good luck.

[soulburner]

before swapping Mother board try different BIOS settings like enabling and diabling cache, and setting memory timings slower.
just trying to give you everything that I know man. I know this is frustrating for you.

[ukulele]

But what I am finding now that even with removing some of the AUX perif's the v's do not change......

As long as the voltage is steady and within specs it's OK. It's fluctuating votage that could be problematic. That would indicate a faulty condenser in the PSU . My bet is your problem is software related.

[FL_otter]

I had unplugged everything (except the onboard Audio...want to hear incase there were Beep codes and problems when I ran the Harware Monitor s.w..... No spare CPU's to try ....(atleast not a P4...Lots or older ones..) Tried diff mem ...same... This is the 3rd HDD since I started this project.... Kept rebooting durring installs of XP and other apps... So I did not want to lose any data...I went with new HDD and kept the orig as an external data drive..

The mem settings in the BIOS are currently set @ DRAM Clock and DRAM Timing "by SPD"..so that in turn is placeing them at DRAM freq of 133MHz and the DRAM FSB freq is 100MHz....... ( dy default...)

Just checked the AGP setting in the BIOS ...it was set to 128mb X4 ...it really should be 64mb x4..... and now the v's read as follows.... +3.3 - 3.20, +5 - 5.03, +12 - 11.56, -12 - -11.04, -5 - -4.89,
VcoreA - 1.66, Vsb 4.82, Vbat 3.17...... Not that much of a diff...

I will keep trying...... and YES VERY FRUSTRATING.... all my other pc's work great.... this one is stuburn!!!!!!!

[Strawbs]

with "Auto Restart" unchecked, software\hardware problems generally give a blue screen error! power "brown-out's" generally cause reboots.

[Microchip]

What the hey, I am as obcessive as you are when it comes to these things so I certainly never intended for you to throw in the towel.
Did you try plugging the PS into a different outlet?

[soulburner]

THat is a good suggestion Microchip I once had one that kept rebooting come to find out the breaker in my electrical panel was faulty for that particular outlet. BTW Do you have a UPS hooked up?

[FL_otter]

These reboots have happend in 4 seperate rooms in the house... the latest is in the new office... All new electrical and up to code... (wish it was that easy...)

Don't worry ... I am one of those who say " Never say die!!"... The more of a pain it becomes... the more obsessive I become with it...

As Strawbs was saying...I get NO B.S.o. D..... nothing !! No dump file... No event log...... it like I just turned the PC on for the first time....

[Strawbs]

Originally posted by FL_otter
These reboots have happend in 4 seperate rooms in the house... the latest is in the new office... All new electrical and up to code... (wish it was that easy...)

Don't worry ... I am one of those who say " Never say die!!"... The more of a pain it becomes... the more obsessive I become with it...

As Strawbs was saying...I get NO B.S.o. D..... nothing !! No dump file... No event log...... it like I just turned the PC on for the first time....

No one can accuse you of being half-assed about this, that's for sure! Your effort is commendable.

How about a bad\weak trace on the Mobo! or poor quality electrical signal into the house?

Those will probably be my last suggestions - cause I think everything else is covered.



BTW: I still favour the PSU.

[Microchip]

You have established that you have a hardware problem as far as I am concerned, you just have to narrow it down to cpu, mainboard, PSU, video card.
Video card, do you have a PCI card that you can test with? In that way, as you know, if this solves the problem, your present card would be the suspect prolem as well as your AGP slot.

[FL_otter]

Well lets see... I have " ukulele " thinking it may be a driver issue and most others a H.W. issue.... I can leave the PC on all day and nothing.... but when I go do do work or listen to mp3's it "spits the dummy"..... I am still looking for a PCI vid card to try out... I will keep you all posted......

[FL_otter]

Ok.... todays update...I removed the AGP card and unistalled all the drivers & SW....( corrected the vid settings in the BIOS also)replaced it with a Creative Labs PCI I had before...Still the same reboots.......One would think that if is was the CPU that it would crash durring the burn in test I conducted as this places a lot of computations and proceses on it... NOT the case here....

Still plugging away at it....

[rmanet]

I have random reboots on a relatively new Dell at work at I know for a fact it's not hardware, checked everything. Stil haven't figured it out, but I do know it's guaranteed to happen when I'm running multiple apps.

I'm with Uke - dumb the machine down at boot - what is loading when the machine starts? You might try to get rid of any unneeded background apps then see how long it takes before you get a reboot. Are you running two AV programs at the same time? And you keep mentioning that it seems to happen more often when you're trying to play mp3 do you have multiple players, and are there other apps that cause it to reboot frequently that you know of?

Have you used sisoft sandra or adia 32 to know exactly what you have - they can be useful tools.

I've had driver conflicts prevent a machine from shutting down, drop internet connections and crash IE (when I used an 56k modem), and my son's gaming machines sometimes would reboot if a sound card and video card driver was a problem, or they were sharing IRQ's that weren't supposed to. I bent a pin on a HDD once, had a problem with incompatible RAM. Even a bad NIC did the same thing with me for awhile....random so it drove me crazy for a weekend.

If you thoroughly messed around with the bios you may need to reset it to defaults or optimized settings, then go through the detail screens to see if a tweak or two is needed - changing settings one by one to try to solve these kinds of problems can be a long and tedious process, and because it ran fine for awhile doubt that's the problem.

Hope this helps.

[FL_otter]

I understand what your are saying rmanet here.... But I have set the Bios back to defaults a few times... the only one I had to adj was the AGP option when I had it in ... I have now gone into the msconfig file and I have a "selective" start up .... only the most needed of programs are starting on boot... my Norton's AV and internet Sec. everything else is unchecked.... and yes only one AV program...

I use the mp3's as my "test"..... but that is it... they are just mp3 files.... no player.... I have them on a extern USB HDD and on the loacal HDD.... And even if I use Media player or Real Player or my Nero player the results are the same.... REBOOT.... I was searching on in web and BAM.....reboot....

I am trying to download the sisoft sandra ..I will try that tool...

The device manager shows not conflicts of problem devices.... When I say it ran fine for awhile... it was more like I will use the laptop because I did not have the time to mess with it...Bulit 2 more since then... They are great.... Just this one is a pain... NO RETREAT..... NO SURRENDER....

[Microchip]

Fl_otter states:
I had unplugged everything (except the onboard Audio...want to hear incase there were Beep codes and problems when I ran the Harware Monitor s.w..... No spare CPU's to try ....(atleast not a P4...Lots or older ones..) Tried diff mem ...same... This is the 3rd HDD since I started this project.... Kept rebooting durring installs of XP and other apps... So I did not want to lose any data...I went with new HDD and kept the orig as an external data drive..

I'm assuming that you kept rebooting during a clean install of XP on a clean formatted drive? If this is so, that pretty much rules out a software problem for me. If you have not done this already, then you have to in order to make sure. I agree with rmanet, it could be something as stupid as a bent pin or a bad cable, check all your conections, try another HDD cable. I agree that you could easily have a firmware problem, and a BIOS setting may be wrong etc. Usually , a firmware problem clears up after clearing your CMOS at least in my tinkering days. You may also try flashing current BIOS if one is available.