AutoReboot?

Anyone have any ideas why my w2k machine would just suddenly reboot itself to the bios screen and start backup again? It doesn't seem to be a windows crash as I'd expect a blue screen if that was the case. Sometimes it will do it at random, but other times its reproducable. I downloaded a gif file this morning and everytime I loaded it into a certain application it would reboot. However loading into paintshoppro, saving as a jpg it was fine. Resizing the itunes app to fit the width of my screen (they don't have a maximize button strangely) caused it to reboot.
Booting to recovery console and chkdsk of all drives initially said they were ok, but then I did a chkdsk c: /p which forces it to do a chkdsk and it found some errors, so then it was a chkdsk c: /r to repair. Then i'll have to do f,g,h,i,j and k..... a long afternoon.

4 Comments

By joy on October 18, 2003 3:37 PM

I'm not going to be of any help just suggesting this, but it sounds like some sort of swap memory issue.

Do you think perhaps there is some bad RAM that isn't allowing for a write to on the disk or something of that nature?

I guess what is curious is the fact that the problem is reproduceable.

By Chris on October 19, 2003 7:46 AM

Hardware driver failure? Is there anything in the logs?

Test your ram with memtest86 - http://www.memtest86.com/

My onboard intel graphics chipset has been causing me grief (but in XP you get the recovered from driver failure message on 640x480 vga) so I finally got round to putting a stonking matrox card in it, and in 1 reboots time it'll have it's proper driver too (it's been in 3 days without).

By Richard on October 19, 2003 10:21 AM

Random rebooting also may occur because of heat issues. Could one of your fans died? Just a thought.

By me on October 19, 2003 5:29 PM

ok - from the feedback so far, initially it seemed to be random but I can reproduce it. Sometimes its occured when printing or scanning, so i suspected it might be a usb driver problem. So temporarily i've removed all usb devices from the pc. However I can reproduce the problem if I open a certain gif file into a cdmenu creator it would do it. However if I opened the same gif file into paintshop pro, saved it as a jpg and then loaded it in it was fine. All other jpg's and gif files seem to be ok. If i copy the file to another name and open that one, it crashes (which rules out a bad hard disk sector). Opening the file in psp, editing it and then resaving it and then opening in cdmenu crashes. Although this one is reproducable and fixed by not opening this file its weird that it crashes back to bios check, is reproducible yet other times the problem occurs "randomly".
I've run a chkdsk on all drives, forcing a fix. I've run memtest for 8 hours today with no errors.
Either I have two problems, one being totally random and another causing a crash on a corrupt gif file in a certain application or its one problem that is reproducable. I'm going to try opening the same file on my office pc, also running w2k to see if it crashes there. Seeing as though its reproducible it almost rules out memory, heat etc etc.

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