Spontaneous reboots

[romano]

Greetings.

I was adding a new sound card and hard drive to my computer when it started to randomly reboot. I figured one of the things I added was the problem so I removed them both but the behavior remained. I removed all other periphreals except boot drive, video card and cd-rom, problem remained. I tried pulling my hair out...problem remained.

Athlon 2400
Abit NS-7 mobo
1 gig Corsair XMS 3200
ATI 9600 pro
Antec Smartpower 400w psu

Booting into safe mode doesn't help.
No overheating per Motherboard Monitor - approx 46 C.
Ran memtest86 for over six hours with no errors - longest amount of time its run before rebooting.
Same problem with different hard drives.
Linux live cd usually runs for an hour or two before freezing.(Slax runs longer than Knoppix)
IDE cables swapped with known good ones.

So I'm left with cpu, mobo or psu. I don't think its the psu since I ran memtest86 for six hours with no problem, but I'm not sure.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[blksun000]

I would advise reseating everything (excluding the processor), and then making sure that all of the drivers are up to date. I have had issues connecting my cdrom to the audio card before, so maybe you should unplug that if you have it directly connected. Definitely just go throught he standard stuff with drivers and checking to make sure the jumpers on the hard drive and everything are set correctly. It is strange that this problem didn't happen before you put new stuff in, but continues after you removed them. I was going to say that maybe you didn't have a beefy enough PSU for the added parts, but that throws that idea out. Does you computer stay on for a while before rebooting? It could be you got some kind of malware or something from the internet and it just happened to be when you were adding new parts. I would check through your processes just in case. Perhaps you could plug your computer into a different wall socket to make sure there isn't a loose connection there or something. Other than that I think you have gone through teh approch that I would have with taking out one part at a time. I would definitely make sure you are not overclocking anything while doing all this though, not until you can get the system stable and not rebooting randomly again. Anyway, I hope it works out.

Cheers!
Blksun000

 

[romano]

Thanks for the suggestions!

To answer a few of your questions:

No overclocking.
If XP actually boots up, it reboots within five minutes. Linux(via live cd) can last up to three hours before freezing(not rebooting) requiring a hard reboot.
Cd rom not connected to sound card - Sound card was the first thing removed. It even reboots with the cd-rom disconnected.
virus scan using progs on the 'Ulimate Boot Disk' http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/​

I tried a few of your other suggestions, change plugs, reseated everything---still no joy.

I'm gonna look for a cheap cpu/motherboard combo to get me by until the end of the year when I'm ready to build a new box.

Thanks again for your help!

 

[blksun000]

That is strange that it takes that long to boot into XP. Here are some other suggestions before you go buy some more stuff. First, to rule out hardware conflicts as the culprit, you can go through your bios and disable all of the nonessential parts of the chipset (all drives but HDD, all extra I/O controllers, extra RAID controllers, etc.) If that doesn't help (and given the time it takes XP to boot I should say that it won't) I would find an extra harddrive, and put a clean install of XP on it with all of your other hardware installed. If it works, and boots in the proper amount of time again (less than 1 min after you have everything set up and you've booted a couple of times beyond the first) then just use it for a little while to see if everything is ok. If it is, then add the harddrive with the ferezing copy of windows (booting from the new one of course) and copy your files from the old to the new. Hopefully you have a large enough spare harddrive for this. I'm not sure how much space you have used on the one. Anyway, then if you want to use the original harddrive, just swap it back in and reinstall windows, copy files back, etc. I would try this before you go buying new hardware. Chhers and good luck. Let me know how things workout.