Constant restarts

grrmisfit

Distinguished
Feb 23, 2010
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core specs 2.3 dual core duo 430 psu geforce 9800 video 2 gigs ram 1tb sata drive HD OS w7 home

system restarted on its own and now doesnt make it to the login screen. it makes it as far as the windows logo then reboots again. chkdsk /r ran and showed nothing wrong. removed all unneeded hardware. only thing i can think of is either the HD is going or corrupt , or the psu might be going and failing once the system goes to fully load the visual part of windows. i can boot to system restore and can visually see everything fine but neither safe mode or normal will boot fully

 

d1rtyju1c3

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Sep 1, 2010
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I had a similar problem were my computer would just re-boot randomly without an error in my events or a BSOD, and it ended up being a USB problem so I started unhooking my USB connections one by one until the problem stopped. It ended up being the USB connection on the motherboard for my card reader, so I shutdown unhooked the card reader rebooted, shut back down, reconnected the card reader and rebooted and everything has been fine ever since. But it could still be the PSU or HDD, but the USBs are a good place to start.
 
If it makes it to a certain point and then stops, I would check the RAM first. It may be hitting a bad sector at that point and crashing. So try flipping the modules, or better yet, booting with one at a time.

One other thing you might check, with a system that old, is that the motherboard's CMOS battery is dead. That basically means the BIOS will reset to defaults every time you turn on the computer, so if there's something like your RAM not being standard voltage, or the video card conflicting with onboard graphics, that could be messing things up. Replacing the battery for like $3 is worth a shot.

If it's neither of these (I believe in looking at the cheapest problem first), then yes, either a PSU problem or a HDD problem could be responsible. I'm not inclined to blame the PSU if it's crashing at a certain point every time, though, unless that point was in the middle of a game. On boot, it's most likely a RAM or HDD issue ... if it's a hardware issue, that is. It's also quite possible with an older system that you just have too much Windows rot and that's making it crash.