Unexplained reboots under win2k

gs39t

Totally randomly, my machine reboots all by itself. There doesnt seem to be a pattern to it. It happens maybe twice a week. Today, i just minimised a window...BAM...reboot. I just did a total reformat and re-install of win2k pro last week. It happened before, and its happening again.

Here's my setup:

300w PSU
Asus A7V8x
XP 1700+ (stock speed)
512mb PC2700 (2x256)
80GB Seagate Barracuda
DVD+RW & CD-RW , DVDRW&HD on one IDE channel, CDRW on other

Windows 2000 fresh install (no SP)

A few other bits and bobs in the PCI slots that i dont think effect it.

Can anyone explain this or give me even a hint of where to look?

TIA

Tenshot

Bit of a long shot this, but ... I had a similar experience while working on a friend's PC recently:

He had a fancy media keyboard with extra keys, including a Suspend key in the top-right corner. Occasionally when I moved the mouse near the keyboard, the back of my hand would brush against the Suspend key and press it. This made Windows 2000 try to enter standby or hibernate mode, but because of a BIOS/motherboard compatibility issue, the effect was to shut down instantly instead.

The fix was simply to turn off advanced power-saving options in either the Control Panel Power settings or the BIOS setup (can't remember which).

Do you leave your system running 24 hours/day or shut it down at night? If the former, maybe it's a resource leak of some kind and the system is resetting when the resource runs out? Checking the totals on Task Manager's Performance screen every few hours might show it up.

By the way, you should install SP3 (or at least SP2); it fixes a bunch of stuff which may or may not help your problem...

gs39t

I DO have the Microsoft internet keyboard, but its not the suspend key issue, and yes, i leave my PC on 24/7 - only reboot when necessary (or when IT feels necessary...)

Thanks

Tazzle

I've a weird problem too like this, just happened out of the blue, sometimes when I reboot it takes AGES to start up, I'm on XP mind, so it should start up in a flash, but it just freezes at the XP Logo screen, then after that it freezes at a black screen, then finally the login comes up, if I login it tries to load ****, then suddenly reboots, it's bloody annoying, if it ever happens I have to just reboot again and hope it doesn't.

gs39t

Happened again two minutes ago. I was typing, pressed enter, BOOM. I was at the POST

HUGE pain. It seems more like a hardware issue to me -i would imagine it would blue screen or such. I had the same issue with the original eircom USB modem drivers. When i installed them, EVERY time it came to "registering your computer on the network..." it rebooted.

Ive long since dumped those drivers, but the fact the same thing happened doesnt seem like a co-incidence

BoB_BoT

em try this, it was mentioned in another post about a machine rebooting for no reason. it could be a conflict of some sort and windows 2k is set to reboot when the conflict appears. go to "system properties -> Advanced -> Start Up & Recovery -> Unclick Automatic Reboot" if the conflict happens again it won't reboot and you should be able to figure out the problem from there.

MadKevo

Maybe your PSU isn't up to the job: try installing MotherBoard Monitor for example and log the various voltages (12V, 5V etc) into a log file - might shed some light on situation if it's not a conflict or software issue.
MK.

sceptre

Originally posted by gs39t
-i would imagine it would blue screen or such.

Win2k automatically reboots by default when it BSODs.

To see if it's doing this:
Right-click "My Computer"
Click Properties
Advanced tab
Startup and Recovery button

Is "Automatically reboot" ticked? If so that's wht you're not getting a BSOD.

... which brings you no nearer to finding a solution but it answers the question

(edit: I see Leggo has already pointed this out. Might have helped if I'd read all the posts)

gurramok

I had similar problem about a month ago.
It auto-rebooted itself on 2 separate time periods for different reasons.
First time it was some unknown process running in taskbar conflicting.
I removed it on startup during recovery mode and it was ok.

Second time auto-reboot kept happening was when I removed 2 hd's from the raid card. This time it was serious as no recovery mode was accessible to stop it.
Testing on another machine all the various parts of the PC, it turned out it was a faulty stick of 256mb RAM.
As sais before, not enough power supplied to your hardware can be a cause as well.

No problems since though

Oriel

I'm currently having the same problem with my Win2k machine in work.
I reghosted it, but the problem was still there, so I did a fresh install. From there it went fine until I installed Win2K SP3. Then it started again, but maybe that was just coincidence.

I haven't a clue what's causing it - by the consistancy of it (with all the software changes), you'd think it's a hardware issue, but the user of the computer before had no problems with it at all.

I dunno.
Using a Mac Cube machine in the mean time

S.

gs39t

Sceptre,

I did what you suggested and havent had the problem since

Ive had some slowdowns and freezes since, so i guess theres some sort of conflict (but nothing showing)

Thanks all!