Reboot rehash

[bard]

I don't know what happened to the original thread but anyway my home pc has been going nuts lately. I couldn't transfer any of the logs to a floppy because every floppy said it needed to be formatted and then wouldn't and I turned everything off before I threw it out the window. A couple of days later I went back at it and I installed my hard drive into another computer and pulled all the files I wanted to keep. I pulled the WinXP install disk out and went to town on reformatting the hd and doing a fresh install. A third of the way into it the damn computer started hanging up and/or rebooting :mad: . So that narrows it down to hardware, right? The sound card is built into the mobo so all I could do was disable it in the CMOS. Same thing for a modem. I replaced the video card with the one from my other computer and pulled the only other add on card which was an ethernet card. So now I have four types of items plugged in, the CPU (P3 850MHz), RAM (2x512, 1x128), the HD (Seagate 20GB) and a Voodoo II PCI card. Same crap. I pulled and tried every combo (including slot usage) of the RAM chips with the same results. I even tried one of the RAM chips from the older computer. No dice. Is the mobo the only thing left that could cause this?

[DarkWolf]

Have you tried a different power supply?

[Marris]

when it blue screens and reboots, what are the stop codes?

those have all the info you need to find out what piece of hardware it is

[bard]

[QUOTE=DarkWolf]Have you tried a different power supply?[/QUOTE]

Not yet. The connections are different on my other computer so I couldn't try that one. I may go ahead and get a new case since this one looks pretty ragged.



[QUOTE=Marris]when it blue screens and reboots, what are the stop codes?

those have all the info you need to find out what piece of hardware it is[/QUOTE]

It never blue screens or pops up any errors. It either freezes and won't continue without hitting the reset button or it resets itself like I reached down and hit the reset button. I'll switch it over again to my other computer and see if I can find the log files again. Would anyone know off hand where exactly to find these logs in WinXP Home?

[Marris]

ok, when it hangs, can you press caps lock? and the light come on and off?

if so, I can send you a utility to create a memory dump, and i can look at it and see if i can tell you what is causing the hang. If not, then it's hardware.

also if you want me to give you a hand, go out to www.microsoft.com (http://www.microsoft.com) search for mpsreports. Then go to downloads, you'll see somewhere on the page, MPSREPORTS_SETUPPERF.exe or something like that. run that, and email it to a-jamh@microsoft.com I'll take a look at that.

[bard]

Thanks for the offer Marris, but I think TexasDevilDog got me going in the right direction when he told me what a problem he has experienced with blown, leaky caps. If I still have problems after I replace the 5 bulging/leaky caps on my mobo, I'll be sure and take you up on your offer.

A big thank you to all in this and the original thread. I'll post up again once I find replacements and get them soldered in.

[TexasDevilDog]

What size you need? I might come up with some if you can't find any. Most caps that blow are usually in the power regulation circuits.

The capacitance needs to be close to the original. If you can't get the exact capacitance then you can go next step up. Don't put lower capacitance caps in nor lower voltage caps. You can put higher working voltage in for replacements, but size may cause a problem.

It was as technician secret of mine. :mad: ;)