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Hard drive makes the system reboot

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jamay   07-07-2008 at 04:34:47 PM

Hey guys,

My roomate has a problem with his hard drive so I thought I's ask the experts what they think is the problem.
He has a raptor 36gb drive (works fine) and a 250gb (WD I think) drive that doesn't work.
When I unplug and plug it back, it is detected in the bios, and windows boots up correctly. I can then access the data on the HD for about 5-10 minutes...after which the computer reboots. After the computer reboots, the HD is not detected in the bios, and I cannot see it in windows.

My theory is that there's a hardware problem (overheating maybe?) and the computer restarts to prevent the HD from frying. If it was a bad sector or a corruption of the indexes on the HD, I wouldn't be able to browse the files for the 5-10 minutes...

Any ideas?

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aevm   07-07-2008 at 04:53:52 PM
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Let me get this straight, you're just sitting there in Windows Explorer, no games or anything intensive running, and 10 minutes is enough to cause trouble? Doesn't sound like overheating to me. What kind of CPU, PSU, case, video card do you have?

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szwaba67   07-07-2008 at 05:26:34 PM
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Yeah, the system shouldn't reboot if a drive is overheating, unless it's getting so hot that it's increasing the temp of the cpu or chipset. If it's XP then it's possible the drive is causing windows to crash and it may be set up to reboot on crashes. I think you can check that in some of the advanced settings when you go into the properties of "My Computer". Anyway, I have seen failing drives bsod in xp. Try doing a scandisk and mark bad sectors, most likely it will want to do it during boot-up so it may be able to complete.

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aevm   07-07-2008 at 05:54:47 PM
- 0 +

If you're using XP: Right click My Computer, properties, Advanced, Settings (under Startup and recovery), make sure "Automatically restart" is NOT checked. For Vista I think it's similar, I just don't have a Vista PC handy right now to check. I'm on XP 64, but I think it doesn't matter.

Next time you get a reboot you might get a BSOD first, and it will wait for you to read it. It might give you some file name (say, whatever driver blows up), or some code you can Google.

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jamay   07-07-2008 at 09:57:32 PM
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Ok, I will check if I can get some info on the BSOD.

As for scanning for bad sectors...how can I do it if I get a crash after 10 minutes? Is there some utility that can do it before startup?

Reply to jamay
aevm   07-07-2008 at 10:06:02 PM
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None that I know of. However, 10 minutes should still be pretty good. These tools start by reading the more important parts of the disk (MBR, FAT, whatever), and you might get something useful right in the first minute.

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linsen   07-11-2008 at 04:53:23 AM
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do u set the sata mode to AHCI & install driver ?maybe that's the problem...

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