• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Reboots like power cut

O

OhSoCheesy

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 6, 2005
Messages
301
Sorry if this is in the wrong place. I just built with all new parts the following:
Gigabyte X58A-UD3R MoBo
3x2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600
Intel i7-930 with retail cooler (for now)
HIS Radeon HD 5850 iCool Turbo
OCZ Game Xstream 80plus 850W P/S
WD 1.5TB 7,200rpm HD
Xaser full tower case with 7 fans

While I'm trying to install Windows 7, it hard reboots randomly. Sometimes it will make it through the first reboot and then ruin the registry on reboot. I used the P/S on my previous system (#2 below) and it worked fine. I am using stock everything with no OC and STD memory settings. The only part I could swap in to test with is a video card, but installing windows shouldn't draw so much power for that. I am really at a loss. Any ideas? Thanks!
 
Last edited:
Generally, random hard reboots mean that the voltage on one of the rails is going out of tolerance, which for most PSU's is +/- .25v from rated. Meaning, if +12 goes to +11.75, instant reboot. If you have a multimeter, try checking some of the rails from the molex connectors and motherboard fan connectors. If you don't have one, boot into CMOS and you should be able to check them from there, not as accurate, but good enough for most. If your spare video card uses less power, then it might not be a bad idea to give it a shot just in case the new one is drawing too much from the 3.3v to put that rail out of tolerance.

Thermal protection might be another reason. Check your thermal paste to make sure there is a solid connection between your processor and heatsink.

Since your issue is commonly related to PSU issues, the next step of troubleshooting would be to purchase another PSU (I suggest any local store with a return policy) and give it a shot. If it works, keep it, if it doesn't, return it.


--On a side note, I am seeing a lot of recertified and refurbished power supply units with that exact name, I wonder if there was a bad batch of these and you happened to be lucky up until this point. I am also seeing that OCZ warranties this PSU for 3 years.
 
Thanks for help mhenley! The 3.3v is at 3.376 and the cpu is at 1.236v. The rest are all very close to spec...at least viewing it in the BIOS. Oh, and I've only had the P/S for a month. I put it into the old system just because it was quieter than the old one and to make sure it worked since I was waiting for a good deal on the parts. Unless you see something above that is really bad, I'll buy a new P/S tomorrow as suggested and see what happens. It sure is tough to get new parts now work out of the box, but I guess it is not unheard of. With stock cooler the CPU is sitting at 40-43C, so I'm not going to rip it apart until the P/S is solid for sure. Why does it always happen at night? :)

Thanks again for your quick insightful response!
 
mhenley said:
Generally, random hard reboots mean that the voltage on one of the rails is going out of tolerance.
Click to expand...

I have to second this idea. I had major problems with hard rebooting, mostly near times when the computer was going from a low power draw state into a high power draw state, like starting up a game. This problem started happening after adding a fan to the system!

Eventually I decided that maybe the power draw was exceeding the amps on one of the 12V rails in my PSU, a 6 rail Enermax Revolution. By spreading out my power draw so that no rail had too much draw (including a video card split over 2 rails), and almost all rails had some draw the system reached a balanced state. However the idea that the voltage was going out of spec during load transitions sounds more probable to me now as per the earlier post.

I suspect that these types of issues are why single rail PSUs are preferred generally, since they'll largely 'just work'. I note your PSU model seems to have 4 12V rails, you might check how you have them distributed.
 
I'm still having issues. There was an issue with the power, but not the P/S. I tried 2 other P/S's and neither would work. It turns out the extra USB's I added from an old system that worked with it causes a fail on this board (it adds 2 USB's to back of case and plugs into MoBo). Also the USB's from the case cause a fail. When I unplug those it works "OK". I was able to get Windows 7-64 installed. But when I try to reboot, it says "bootmgr not found" or something like that about bootmgr. If I go into Windows repair and try to fix it, it says there is no problem. When I reboot after that it boots fine. It runs fine after that too until the next reboot. Games work great too. I haven't tried OC'ing it, so everything is still stock...even RAM is at 1066. Any ideas? Thanks!
 
OhSoCheesy said:
I'm still having issues. There was an issue with the power, but not the P/S. I tried 2 other P/S's and neither would work. It turns out the extra USB's I added from an old system that worked with it causes a fail on this board (it adds 2 USB's to back of case and plugs into MoBo). Also the USB's from the case cause a fail. When I unplug those it works "OK". I was able to get Windows 7-64 installed. But when I try to reboot, it says "bootmgr not found" or something like that about bootmgr. If I go into Windows repair and try to fix it, it says there is no problem. When I reboot after that it boots fine. It runs fine after that too until the next reboot. Games work great too. I haven't tried OC'ing it, so everything is still stock...even RAM is at 1066. Any ideas? Thanks!
Click to expand...

Have you considered bumping the RAM voltage just a bit? Along with that how about some time testing the RAM?

"bootmgr not found" is usually a memory clue.

Could be one stick bad or shaky or as a group your RAM might require just a bit move voltage.

One other thought, are you running the newest BIOS version? Win-7 sometimes doesn’t like older BIOSs.

Just some quick thoughts
 
Thanks Bill,
I didn't know it was generally a RAM issue. It shows 1.54v in the Gigabyte Easytune 6 program. I'll try some Memtest tonight. BIOS is up to date (they have only one version available so far on this board, which is ver 2.0 of the board). This should help get me started. Thanks much! I'll report back tomorrow what I find.
 
I can't get Memtest86 to work with my 64bit system, but I used a couple other tests and found no problem with the memory. Here is what I did find though...as long as the windows DVD is in the drive, it will load the boot screen to load Win7 (or the old version, which has been deleted). I can ignore the "load from DVD" and it works fine, but otherwise it can't find the bootmgr. I just thought I had to go to the repair windows. So any ideas? Thanks!
 
OhSoCheesy said:
I can't get Memtest86 to work with my 64bit system, but I used a couple other tests and found no problem with the memory. Here is what I did find though...as long as the windows DVD is in the drive, it will load the boot screen to load Win7 (or the old version, which has been deleted). I can ignore the "load from DVD" and it works fine, but otherwise it can't find the bootmgr. I just thought I had to go to the repair windows. So any ideas? Thanks!
Click to expand...

I’d suggest a full reinstall, with a full format this time. If everything is stable with your work around a new install should do fine now.
 
Even though it was a new install with a format originally? Thanks for all the help Bill!
 
OhSoCheesy said:
Even though it was a new install with a format originally? Thanks for all the help Bill!
Click to expand...

Yes, unless I misunderstood you your system was booting to either one install or another (or part of another). That’s a bad thing.

If it’s stable now (more than before) your last install is probably corrupted or at least partially so.

Just to be sure I’d reinstall and delete the old partitions, remake them and then format. Keep in mind on most systems win-7 creates a hidden partition and unless you delete that as well part of the old OS remains and can give you grief.

And hey, its win-7, 20 minutes tops and you are fully installed. Oh, unplug any other drives in the system before you do your install. Win-7 will look everywhere to try to “help” you, and it’s really no help at all but it can find garbage you don’t want as part of your new OS.
 
When it boots (as described before) it gets to a screen that asks if I want to load Win7 or an older Windows install. The older install is gone because I deleted it. Basically I used an upgrade disk and installed Win7 (formatted and installed fresh) and then reinstalled as an upgrade so I would be able to activate Windows. After the upgrade I deleted the .old Windows installation.

I'm using two Raptor 32GB drives in RAID 0 as my system drive and a 1.5TB drive for files. The 1.5TB drive was new and the RAID had to be built from scratch since the system it was attached to before had a different RAID controller. Any thoughts on if they could be part of the problem? If you think a reinstall will fix it, then that's what I'll do. As always, thanks much for your insight and time!
 
OhSoCheesy said:
When it boots (as described before) it gets to a screen that asks if I want to load Win7 or an older Windows install. The older install is gone because I deleted it. Basically I used an upgrade disk and installed Win7 (formatted and installed fresh) and then reinstalled as an upgrade so I would be able to activate Windows. After the upgrade I deleted the .old Windows installation.

I'm using two Raptor 32GB drives in RAID 0 as my system drive and a 1.5TB drive for files. The 1.5TB drive was new and the RAID had to be built from scratch since the system it was attached to before had a different RAID controller. Any thoughts on if they could be part of the problem? If you think a reinstall will fix it, then that's what I'll do. As always, thanks much for your insight and time!
Click to expand...

Exactly, you delete .old but you never cleared the hidden win-7 partition because you never deleted the entire old partitions.

Obviously I’m not there but for the time involved and considering your current boot issues, I’d do a full blown new install including deleting all old partitions on your raid (delete in windows install) and give it a shot.

Like they say, don’t cost nothing and you have everything to gain ;)
 
Oh, and #3 on your Sig is priceless! That sounds like most Texans...do you happen to be one?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top