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Random PC shutdowns, and now failure to boot to windows.

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  • Components
Last response: in Components
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August 25, 2014 2:42:10 PM

Specs:

i5 2500k
GTS 450
Corsair Vengeance dd3 ram (8gb, 2 sticks)
Thermaltake Purepower 500w PSU
Hyper 212 Evo CPU Heatsink
Intel SSD
Seagate Barracuda HDD



Alright, so my problems started two days ago, when I was browsing the internet and talking to a friend on Skype, and my computer shut off without warning. It stuttered, fans spinning for a second, before shutting off, repeatedly.

I stripped the motherboard down to the PSU and heatsink (At the time, a stock heatsink), when I realized one of the plastic clips on the stock heatsink had broken off, and was not secure. After adding a stick of RAM, and my GPU, I got into BIOS and saw that my CPU was running at 92C....ouch! The following day (yesterday) I went and purchased the Hyper 212 Evo Heatsink.

As of last night, temps are fantastic. GPU hits mid 60s during games, CPU never goes above 35-40....the only problem is, I was still getting seemingly arbitrary crashes.

When this happened, it was the same as before, with the case/hsu fans spinning up, LEDs coming on, and turning off within 2 seconds. Now here's where it gets strange (at least to me!)

Removing components seemed to sometimes cause the PC to stay turned on. For example, this morning I removed the GPU and turned the PC on....and it worked. But the next time it crashed, this did not work at all.

I have tried the following:

Running just about every possible combination of single channel/dual channel with my RAM, completely removing the GPU heatsink and re-seating/re-pasting, completely removing and re-seating every single cable on my motherboard, resetting cmos, and cleaning out my PSU.

And now I have a new problem...when I boot with my SSD, I get the "Insert Boot disk and press any key" error, even though I was just in Windows 20 minutes ago on this SSD.

My HDD does not have an OS installed, and gets a different error about not finding a boot partition

I dug out an older sata drive with XP on it, and that actually booted into Windows, however, the copy I have is apparently unregistered so that's as far as I got.

My first assumption was that the initial overheats may have damaged my CPU, but I am now thinking Motherboard...at any rate, I'm at a complete loss.

What the hell do I do?

More about : random shutdowns failure boot windows

August 25, 2014 3:24:30 PM

It looks like PSU issue. It might have worn out. First, try another PSU or one with higher wattage.
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August 25, 2014 3:35:53 PM

Anurag Roy said:
It looks like PSU issue. It might have worn out. First, try another PSU or one with higher wattage.


Would a PSU issue cause these strange problems with the hard drives, though?
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August 25, 2014 5:03:57 PM

Update

I found a copy of W7 to install over the drive with XP on it. It boots and runs W7 just fine...with the SSD added, it shows up in drive manager and can be accessed as storage.

I tried booting from the SSD, and I'm still receiving the same error as before. Currently planning to backup the essentials from the SSD and reformat, but I'm unsure if that will have any effect on the shutdowns I was having before. Any ideas?
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August 25, 2014 9:03:56 PM

Update

Reformatted the SSD, everything was going well....and then I let it run for about an hour and a half, and, once again, we're back to the crashes. I'm at a loss. I want to say PSU, since I think if it was motherboard related, it wouldn't stay on as long as it does.
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August 26, 2014 2:33:39 PM

Still having random crashes, which seem entirely arbitrary. Typically after the crash, the pc tries to boot up and fails repeatedly to do so. Computer ran fine long enough to install windows and idle around for about an hour, before crashing again.
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