Associate
- Joined
- 8 Jan 2006
- Posts
- 340
- Location
- Leicestershire
Guys, can I have some help troubleshooting this one?
After almost a year of flawless use, my PC has taken to rebooting when I'm not looking. The last two times it's happened, I've gone down for dinner and come back up to find the PC just post-POST complaining of no boot device. Sure enough, the boot HDD is not in the BIOS when I look. If I turn off the PC, then back on again, all is fine.
Computer has just been sitting idle both times this happened. Nothing on the system has changed recently either. Nothing in the event logs help at all - there's nothing but "Last shutdown unexpected" in the system log.
I've checked that there are no bizarre power settings, but like I said no changes recently, only Windows Defender updates.
I'm leaning towards HDD issue, or SATA controller issue. FYI I am running my Gigabyte DS4 SATA controller in AHCI mode.
Scandisk shows no issues on any disks (including surface scan!). S.M.A.R.T. reports all drives healthy.
I've reset CPU to stock to aid troubleshooting.
HDD is a WD Caviar SE 250GB, OS is Vista 64bit.
I'm hoping to actually witness the next reboot, as there might be a blue screen, but usually this leaves a dump file and event log record, so I'm truly baffled. One event that may be of consequence though:
"The winlogon notification subscriber <TrustedInstaller> was unavailable to handle a critical notification event."
So at least it tried to tell me the problem. Anywhere else I can look?
Are there any other tests I can run to determine hardware failure? Any good apps out there you recommend?
Ta!
After almost a year of flawless use, my PC has taken to rebooting when I'm not looking. The last two times it's happened, I've gone down for dinner and come back up to find the PC just post-POST complaining of no boot device. Sure enough, the boot HDD is not in the BIOS when I look. If I turn off the PC, then back on again, all is fine.
Computer has just been sitting idle both times this happened. Nothing on the system has changed recently either. Nothing in the event logs help at all - there's nothing but "Last shutdown unexpected" in the system log.
I've checked that there are no bizarre power settings, but like I said no changes recently, only Windows Defender updates.
I'm leaning towards HDD issue, or SATA controller issue. FYI I am running my Gigabyte DS4 SATA controller in AHCI mode.
Scandisk shows no issues on any disks (including surface scan!). S.M.A.R.T. reports all drives healthy.
I've reset CPU to stock to aid troubleshooting.
HDD is a WD Caviar SE 250GB, OS is Vista 64bit.
I'm hoping to actually witness the next reboot, as there might be a blue screen, but usually this leaves a dump file and event log record, so I'm truly baffled. One event that may be of consequence though:
"The winlogon notification subscriber <TrustedInstaller> was unavailable to handle a critical notification event."
So at least it tried to tell me the problem. Anywhere else I can look?
Are there any other tests I can run to determine hardware failure? Any good apps out there you recommend?
Ta!
