Computer randomly rebooting. Help me find cause?

[bungiefan]

Within the past week my computer has started just rebooting itself. It will just go to a black screen and repost, popping up the splash screen and doing the normal boot sequence. There doesn't seem to be a consistent cause, it will do it if I just leave the computer at the desktop after a normal boot, or if I am watching a video, browsing the web, or copying files. It started doing this and I decided it was time for my annual XP reinstall to speed my system back up. That didn't fix it.

Hardware wise, I'm running Windows XP SP2 (probably will upgrade to SP3 once I get my system stable and make a backup image with Acronis, as it broke my TV input card on the previous install and I'm going to be picky about my updates) on a Pentium 4 3 GHz HT on a ASUS P4P800-E mobo with 3 GB of RAM, two optical drives, 5 internal hard drives (4 SATA 1 IDE), 1 floppy drive, 3 external Firewire hard drives, an Antec 500W power supply, A LeadTek TV2000XP Expert TV input card, a Gigabyte gv-n66256dp GeForce 6600 graphics card (previously a Radeon 9600 Pro from Sapphire, replaced during the reinstall), and an APC BackUPS XS 800 battery backup. Fearing the IDE drive being added about a month ago had started overloading the power supply I unplugged one of the optical drives, the IDE hard drive, and the floppy drive from my mobo and power supply. It's still rebooting.

I have had some weird behaviour. My EZFlash III EZWriter2 drive didn't install properly the first time, it got recognized as a Cogent webcam and auto-installed by Windows, so I had to manually force the driver, which made it show up properly in Device Manager. I think it might have been a conflict with installing my Logitech C200 webcam first though. In Event Manager I am getting four errors in the System category, and they seem to coincide with the time of several of my crashes. They are:

The Eset Trial Reset service failed to start due to the following error:
The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion.

Timeout (30000 milliseconds) waiting for the Eset Trial Reset service to connect.

The EZWINIT2 service failed to start due to the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

The CogentDriver service failed to start due to the following error:
The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

I can't find the CogentDriver or EZWINIT2 services in my management snap-ins to stop them or remove them. I did just replace my 5 year old 80 GB SATA drive my OS used to be on with a newer 500 GB one I've had about a year, so I'm thinking it isn't my hard drive causing the crash. I'm wondering if it's software (I might have to try one of my Ubuntu Live discs and see if it reboots), RAM, my mobo, or my power supply causing this, but I don't have spares of any of that equipment. This computer was built in a class I took at an IT trade school in August of 2005, and I've just added to it. All the original equipment is there except the two 80 GB SATA drives they gave me, I blew up the 350W power supply it came with by overloading it with 4 hard drives originally (which took a year to kill it), but a new power supply worked and no hardware died from the blowup, and I've replaced the GeForce MX4000 with two newer cards now. A CPU temp monitor said my CPU was running at 80C before the reinstall, so I regreased it, and now it's running at about 60C, and I cleaned out all the dust I could find on all my fans and vents, the heat sink on the CPU, etc. I've got a fan on each side of my HDD rack (the 4 SATA drives are stacked on rails in the case), one glued to the bottom heatsink on the graphics card with heat-tolerant silicone adhesive, one in the power supply, and one on the back of the case.

Done with edits for now, might reorganize info and reparagraph it later.

[Amastacia]

Most of the times I've had spontaneous reboots with no BSODs or other warning have been from one of two sources.

1) Dying RAM. MemTest the crap out of it, MemTest it again, and try things like Prime95 Blend tests (which are torturous to RAM).

2) Dying power supply. If you have a spare one that'll run your rig, swap, and see if you still get spontaneous reboots.

Testing RAM is less of a hassle than testing PSU, so that's a good place to start. MemTest may not throw any errors, I had one situation where a stick was slowly dying, checked out alright for a while (while still causing spontaneous reboots) and then a couple months later started erroring out on MemTest.

Since you have 3GB of RAM, if MemTest doesn't return a positive, try testing with various configs of 2GB, and see if you can isolate a faulty stick that way.

[Killgannon]

memtest86

sounds like dying ram

[bungiefan]

Haven't had time to burn the memtest discs and boot to them yet, but uninstalling ESET and replacing it with Avast reduced my crashes from ~6 per day, to where I just lasted 30 hours between reboots. It still did the errors about EZWINIT2 and CogentDriver at the time of the crash though. If those errors don't show up, I don't crash, and every time they show up, I crash within 10 seconds of the event.

[bungiefan]

Well, we've got it happeneing on other computers now. Two of the Win7 notebooks in my house (my main computer is a WinXP desktop) have started bluescreening and rebooting themselves about as often as my desktop does. WOndering if this is a piece of malware.

I ran out of CDs to burn MEMTEST to, so I'm going out to get some, and moving the torrent I'm seeding to a different computer so I can run the memtest.

[bungiefan]

OK, it rebooted in the middle of installing Windows XP now. I put Ubuntu 9.10 on it instead and it's not rebooting, though it does seem to lock up completely at least once a day, flashing my keyboard's lock lights at me.

A friend potentially has a spare motherboard for me to try to see if that is the problem.

[Pikarya]

I ran out of CDs to burn MEMTEST to, so I'm going out to get some, and moving the torrent I'm seeding to a different computer so I can run the memtest.

Can put it on a usb drive also to boot. But yes, its either memory/psu, temps, imo.

[bungiefan]

Didn't think I've ever seen a way to boot my mobo to USB. I forgot to put it here, but I did say on other forums I asked on. I bought CDs the next day and ran Memtest86+ all night, with no crashes or errors. It did about a dozen memory passes. It seems like I'm either down to the mobo or the power supply.

[sruon]

Check the CPU is correctly socketed, even a 1 mm difference can cause the very same symptoms.

[bungiefan]

It's a ZIF plugin. it either goes in or it doesn't. It's seated firmly, and it hadn't been moved for about a year before the rebooting started. The heat sink locks down on top of it.

I did reseat it during the troubleshooting because I had to regrease it.

[Mayareira]

Random Reboots are almost always caused by dying RAMs. After regular memtest checks, try removing a stick to see if there is a problem with it.

I don't think this is a power supply issue, systems don't reboot, they cut the power completely when there is a problem with psu to avoid damage.

[Ordengate]

When I had issues similar to yours, it was a temp issue. I regreased the cpu with no luck to find out the video card was overheating. Try taking off the side of the case and sticking the box fan on the computer while running something intensive like a game.

[bungiefan]

It's not even doing anything intensive, it did it installing Windows the last time, and will do it regardless of what I'm running. Temperatures are coming back at about 50-60C tops since I cleaned out the computer, and I was warned by the guy that gave me the GeForce 6600 that they had a reputation for overheating for gaming use (this is a fanless version), so I glued a fan to the bottom heatsink with some automotive heat tolerant silicone adhesive. The heat sinks don't even get hot to the touch anymore.

[Equitas]

this happened to me once so i'll just mention it. (Motherboard Blew a Capacitor) Would just randomly shutdown on me after random time, sometimes would re-boot othertimes had to wait some time before it would even respond when hitting power button.

1. Un-plug pc, ground yourself and open the case.
2. Look at the little capacitors on the motherboard. They all should be smooth and just slightly lower then the casing around them. If any are bulging or have exploded that could be a cause.

[bungiefan]

I'm pretty much just hunting for a replacement board now, and brand new ones are still $200+, so I'm hitting the used market. Think I can get one for under $75 total, and that will be within my cost. Also looking into a new budget tower for my uses, as this is the only mobo I can find with plugins for all the cards and hard drives I use frequently, and I need these drives running for the file server purpose. I'll just use the slightly newer tower for the games I play. Someone is building me an XP tower with a monitor for abotu $300 that will become my main machine. As I play older games from the mid-90s, Win7 has compatability issues I don't want to deal with yet, and I don't need the amount of power it takes to run Win7.

[Amastacia]

That's a mistake, I'm almost positive.

I did the same thing a while back (in the period when my RAM was not showing obvious errors during memtesting), and while the problem seemed to become less frequent for a while, it eventually came back full force.

Try running with varying combinations of 2GB, and see if the crashes/lockups are related to having 1 of the DIMMs in the system. Along with that, try different combinations of DIMM slots on the motherboard, to see if you have a bad slot (which would be a good reason to replace mobo).

[Equitas]

I don't need the amount of power it takes to run Win7.

Windows 7 requires very little power to run LOL its no different then windows XP and far more efficient then vista tried to be. unless your running les then 1g in ram, but then im surprised anything would run on a machine nowadays.

Why do you think windows 7 was created for netbooks first

[Olo401]

Go into your Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer and look under System. There might be some clues there to figure out the problems you're having.

[bungiefan]

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16813131492

That's the mobo I have.

I posted, in the very first post, what was showing up in my Event Viewer. That was the first place I looked. I'm not running Windows on this machine anymore right now because it started crashing during install, and Linux is at least usable for several hours on end. Thus I can't get any more errors to post.

My RAID array doesn't work in Win7, and that's 600 GB of drive space I'd be losing. Also, the system doesn't run as fast on Win7 as it does on XP, and some of my older games don't work right, like Ys 1+2 Eternal, which I'm still working on. If I need Win7, I can dual-install, but I've tinkered with it and prefer XP for some of the things my MCP training taught me to do that I can't do in Win7 without multiple reboots.

Now if I can find a comparable MSI mobo, I'd be interested in that. More professional consensus is telling me the mobo I have is the likely problem.

[Ejac]

I haven't read everyone's posts but here what I would do.

First take out both sticks of RAM and turn on the PC, if it starts beeping then that's good. It shows your motherboard is recognizing that there is no RAM installed.

Next I would try to hook up another power supply. There are times when your PSU will boot up the machine and cause reboot loops. Even when you think it's giving enough power to boot it up, just take my word on this one.

My guess is the power supply. It's either that or the motherboard and if you mobo is recognizing no ram and giving beep codes then most of the time it's working properly. If you're still getting reboot loops after trying another PSU then I would move on to scanning the RAM like some of the guys above recommended.

If both of those test out good and it's still rebooting then try removing any cards you can. Only have the things needed plugged up. Mobo, HD, and CD Rom for booting. Just trial and error with everything by unhooking until it stops the reboot loops.

Goodluck!