Power up from sleep mode, see lock screen, then hard restart

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kevineugenius

[H]ard|Gawd
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Dec 9, 2006
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There has been lightning lately, did something in my power supply or motherboard get damaged?

I put my computer to sleep as I always have. Since the 17th, though, when I try to power on from sleep via the power button it will do a hard reset with an audible click inside the machine.

I have run the Windows power troubleshooter, reset the power schemas to default, restored the system to the 15th, and set the power button to 'do nothing' in the power settings. It continues to do a restart 100% of the time when coming out of sleep mode.

Any idea if this is software or hardware? If hardware, which component might be the problem?
 
Seriously though, Do you have a spindle drive? That clicking may be a sign of impending doom. Not using a UPS is a no-no. Go buy one then start trouble shooting your hardware with the mighty Hirens disk unless you have known good parts you can swap with. Also, for the love of all things holy, do a drive check with the manufacturers test tool if spindle.
 
About 10 seconds after posting my original, the machine restarted by itself, which is a new trouble. Took me several tries to get back into Windows at all. Primary drive is SSD but there are 3x spindle drives in RAID and I'd be more than happy to unplug them all and see what that does.
 
So far it's 2 for 2 starting up, which isn't that significant except for the problem had been 100% fail rate.

There may, however, be more to the story. The indicator LEDs on the motherboard, which aren't visible when the case isn't open, suggest my RAM may also have some issues but I'll save that for another day.

What clued you in that it was a spindle drive? Just the clicking? When you do a hard reset or poweroff on a computer and it makes an audible click, is that the disk drive? I always thought it was an electro-mechanical relay inside the PSU or something, similar to the way older cars click when you use certain electrical functions.
 
I have a 2TB Western Digital that clicks when it powers down via Windows idle in a cradle dock. Also, yes, some drives start clicking right before they die. I presume it is the little magnetically controlled arm, and that bad boy rides on a bearing of some sort and it fails/sticks, hence the clicking.

Shouldn't be much of any clicking on newer power supplies.

The RAM thing might be errors from faulty RAM or timings-voltage may be off.

You have to look up the codes for your board.
 
So, what was this Hirens thing supposed to do for me? I ran memtest 86 from it, that didn't even work. I ran Windows Memory Diagnostic and found no errors.

I still have the spinners disconnected and now the PC is restarting itself during use maybe once every two days or so. The clicking noise is now much quieter, more akin to a healthy restart noise. However, the hard reboots are a problem and I'm a little lost where to look next. I get no messages, nothing to go on as far as troubleshooting goes.
 
I guess I'm not seeing anything about motherboard tests. There are several graphic checkers and RAM checkers but I don't see much else. I went into DOS programs and browsed around; the whole utility says Hiren's Boot CD 15.2 across the top.

Just now the PC restarted when coming out of sleep again. When I get back from vacation I'll just start abusing Best Buy's return policy I guess and swap out parts one at a time >:[
 
Well, something ain't right. Maybe these utilities were made too long before my hardware was made or maybe I'm dumb as a rock. The HGST vendor utility doesn't even find my hard drives, the HD tester on the Hiren's CD starts to run but then does nothing. The memtest86 on Hirens starts to run but then does nothing. I dunno. I was re-seating everything and found my main motherboard power connector was loose. It, for some reason, doesn't go in far enough to engage the latch so hopefully that's the entire source of all my problems. If it continues, though, I guess RMA the mobo first and see what happens. MSI didn't offer any help in troubleshooting, only said to send the board in. I'd much rather have a reasonable clue before doing that but... I don't have many other options.

Occasionally during startup the EZ Debug LED for the video card will go red; not sure if that means anything (since it's during boot) or not, but if it does mean something then it literally could be any component in this system that is being wonky and that's my least favorite place to be.
 
With that many issues, either the cd-drive is flakey or that mainboard is flaky. Send the board in.
 
I was running it from USB; I wonder if some of the applications on there aren't able to work that way? It's not a Hirens supported method of use, just what I could put together.
 
Yea...I've only used it with a cd drive. I keep a couple around for troubleshooting etc.
 
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