Random Restarts

[Jersey Steve]

Wasn't sure if this was the right place to post this but here goes anyway. I have been having frequent and totally random restarts lately. Sometimes it will be fine all day and others it will restart 10 times in an hour. It doesn't really seem to matter what I am doing, if I am am asleep and the screensaver is on or if I am playing World of Warcraft. It's already done it while I was trying to post this. Sometimes I get a BSOD with errors like IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL and Machine Check Exception, but most of the time it will just restart as if i had hit the reset button.

This all seemed to have started when I replaced my dead C Drive with a Maxtor 100GB 7200rpm SATA/150 drive. So I am leaning towards that being the problem, but would like to be sure before I spend money to replace it.

My PC:
WinXP Pro SP2
Athlon XP 64 3000+
Abit AX8
1GB (2x512) Corsair XMS DDR400
Geforce 6200
Thermaltake Silent Purepower 480w power supply
C: Maxtor 100gb SATA/150
D: WD 80GB EIDE
Benq DVDROM
TDK 440n DVD-RW

I sure hope thats enough to go on, any idea would be a big help since I am at a total loss.

 

[RavenD]

Run Memtest. If you get any errors, run it with one stick of ram in at a time.

 

[Frank4d]

Is the new HD cloned from the original? Or fresh install of XP? If it is cloned and your PC worked before the new HD, I would suspect the new HD. But if it is a fresh install then maybe missing or wrong drivers.

 

[Jersey Steve]

Yeah, it was a fresh install. Is there anyway to check my drivers to see if any of them are causing the problem?

 

[DeChache]

IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL and Machine Check Exception

Those are Hardware Errors I got the IRQL NOT LESS OR EQUAL when I had some bad RAM and I got the Machine Check Exception with a hard drive that my comp didnt like. I would run Memtest and then go down to only whats needed to run the box(I.E 1 stick of ram 1 hdd 1 optical drive) and then start adding until it repeats.

I got money on the memory being it though it seems like Corsair had a bad batch of memory a while back.

 

[Jersey Steve]

It seems like there are a few different programs called Memtest. Any recommendations? I tried the Microsoft one but couldn't get the CD to boot.

 

[Jersey Steve]

Update:
The first thing I did was to disable automatic restarts. So now when it crashes I get stop messages. I've gotten all kinds of stops: 0x24. 0x9c, 0xc5. 0x24, 0x8e, 0x0a, 0x7f. So, I ran memtest for 3hrs and came up error free. I was doing some more research and decided to run verifier.exe, it gave me this error: "stream.sys (wdm driver error 22e) [stream.sys+705a @ F75fe05a]" the first time I ran it so I removed then reinstalled that driver. Now when I try to run verifier.exe it gives me a stop 0x0A when I restart. I have to boot into safe mode (safe mode always seems to boot/run fine) and disable verifier before I can boot windows normally again. It's really starting to look like I'm going to have to do a full re-install, which is the last thing I want to do because its such a pain to load SATA drivers for XP when installing. Anyone have any ideas how I may be able to find the offending driver with out using verifier?