Something is going badly wrong again...

sjt269

sjt269

sjt269

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11 Dec 2004
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I really don't have much luck with PCs.


Recently, this one has been acting up more than normal...on startup, I'd get errors telling me various software couldn't start - Catalyst Control Center was a favourite, as was Explorer, Dr Watson Postmortem Debugger (?) and various misc services. The computer has taken up spontaneously restarting whenever it feels the need, whether I'm browsing the internet, watching a DVD, or playing a game. In fact, it's fond of restarting as I exit games. Also when I enter them. When I get into a game, it's generally all right.

Thing is, today I turned it on and it went through three (!) restarts before getting to Windows. There was a BSOD telling me some drivers (I suspect graphics, from the error gibberish that came up on screen) had gone into an 'infinite loop' and prevented the PC from starting. So, installed the latest Catalysts, and reinstalled the sound drivers (wierd errors from that lately, too) and hoped it was all gone. It wasn't. PC still takes several restarts to turn on, and it's still turning off whenever it wants to. I don't really know what more to do. I'm going to do some spyware/virus scans, but I do them semi-regularly anyway and there's never anything more serious than the odd tracking cookie.

Happy to post more info/diagnostics if I find out which to post. Frankly, I don't know whats up. Putting it in this forum as I suspect its a software issue rather than hardware, but I can't honestly be sure, I'm just guessing.

To top it all off, this morning my phone SIM got itself inactivated for no reason whatsoever, and my guitar strings are persistently going badly flat if I so much as breathe in their general direction. Today is not a good day. :o


Help will be much appreciated. :(
tTz
 
Sounds like a driver or a ram issue to me. Can u boot into safe mod without problems? tap F8 continuously before boot up to select 'safe mode' :).
 
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Nothing overclocked. Also added nothing new since I built it in October. It was my first build, so I'm open to the possibility that I've done something else stupid putting it together, but it's odd that it's taken this long to properly kick off. Nothing new installed recently either. Actually, come to think of it, I installed some phone software stuff last week, but removed most of it. The problem was there before then, anyways.

Safe mode, I dunno, but I'll try. It's a wireless keyboard that doesn't get accepted on some BIOS type screens, so I'll dig out the wired one and give that shot. Maybe I should give Memtest a run too?

Driver issue sounds like a good call, but having reinstalled graphics and sound drivers already, I don't really know what else to try. :o

AVG scan is done, and come up clean. Ad-Aware seems to be finding the usual tracking cookies etc, it's chuntering away in the background just now.
 
Aye give MemTest a go. Wouldn't hurt and will at least eliminate your RAM if the test comes back OK.

Perhaps it would be worth a format/reinstall and see how things work "out of the box" as it were. If it doesn't that might point to some hardware issues. If it is OK then you might have some driver issues.
 
MarcLister said:
Perhaps it would be worth a format/reinstall and see how things work "out of the box" as it were. If it doesn't that might point to some hardware issues. If it is OK then you might have some driver issues.
Click to expand...


I had enough formats last year on my old PC to last me a lifetime - had about 8 in the space of a fortnight at one point from that bloody machine. Then again, it would streamline and speed up the whole PC, so maybe some fiddling is in order.


I'll go run MemTest and a hard disk checker just now. The good news is that it only took two restarts to turn the PC on today. :o


:edit:

Would defragmenting the hard drive be of any use? I remember seeing somewhere that modern PCs don't need their hard drives defragged as frequently/at all, but I don't know if that was a myth or not. Either way, defragmenting is something I almost never do, which might be a stupid way to run a PC, I don't know.
 
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tTz said:
I had enough formats last year on my old PC to last me a lifetime - had about 8 in the space of a fortnight at one point from that bloody machine. Then again, it would streamline and speed up the whole PC, so maybe some fiddling is in order.
Click to expand...
Hmm sounds like the default drivers are OK. The drivers you are installing for something could be screwing something up?

tTz said:
I'll go run MemTest and a hard disk checker (HDTach all right? Already got that one installed for some reason) just now. The good news is that it only took two restarts to turn the PC on today. :o
Click to expand...
Yep MemTest and HDTach would be good. Done a chkdsk?

And only two restarts? :D
 
Heh, you caught me before my ninja edit. Turned out HD Tach wasn't installed, downloaded it already and it's running now, though. I'll run it again without me using the PC, because I don't know what effect that'll have on it, but it was over halfway through before that ocurred to me. In fact, that's it finished now...results look a bit odd, but I shall blame that on various other programs etc. Closing them all off now and re-running.


:edit:

Better now.

hdtach1.gif
 
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Looks OK to me. Not an expert at reading those though.

Might as well defrag. I wouldn't say your problems are caused by fragmented files/disk though. Simpy too major a problem for fragmentation to have caused imo.
 
My God, this is a busy forum, I've been relegated to the third page already. Alright then, an update:

Turned the PC on earlier, and it went into a massive series of loops for about twenty minutes which I couldn't break it out of, not with resets, restarts, hammering of the F8 key, nothing. Went out for a drive, then came back to it later, messed about for a bit with an older PS2 connector keyboard and gave it another shot. Got it booted into Safe Mode, but the screen just came up black, so I turned the PC off again with the button. Restarted it, missed the safe mode window of opportunity due to me spinning around in the chair daydreaming, and suddenly the PC loaded up, almost perfectly, just with an error in the HD audio driver, which was one of the things I'd reinstalled the other day. The error (pic below) seems to point to a certain dll, and some other brief BSODs seemed to mention the sys32 folder before the restarts cut them off.

error.gif



I'm going to try and back up all data the best way I can find without turning the PC off now, in case I can't get it back on. Got tonnes of stuff to back up, though...20Gb of my recordings alone (can't believe that, there must be so much junk in there) plus photos and various other bits and pieces. I've got an old spare HDD, but I have to turn the PC off to get that connected, so that's my second backup option after I finish the DVD burning/network transfer methods. Actually, I guess that would make it my third backup option.


I'm now thinking a repair install of Windows - how's that sound? It seems like its the sys32 stuff that's going wrong, but I don't know how to really fix that. I'd imagine copy and pasting someone elses sys32 folder would involve registry differences and stuff that would totally screw up this PC? In fact, I probably wouldn't be able to overwrite sys32 anyways, it'll be in use by the OS. Sigh.:o


I'd really rather not reformat, all my stuff is on the same partition, and I don't want to lose it all. I'd have different partitions, but my last experiment along those lines was a bit of a disaster, so I chose not to repeat it, and take this 'easy' option instead. Oh, how wrong I was. Next purchase shall be an IcyBox with USB or Firewire connectivity so I can do more regular backups.
 
Unfortunately, I don't think I can afford another hard drive at the moment. I've got a 160Gb IDE drive in the cupboard, so I could pick up a £20 IDE IcyBox and use that for now, until I either get more cash or need more storage space. :(


:edit:

No, I've got a spare 10Gb IDE drive in the cupboard, the 160Gb is in the old PC I just pulled down from the attic, and that's the one I shall be using for backups.
 
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