Vista - Random Shut Downs, Hard Drive turns off...

[kbc]

Hi, I'm having problems with Vista - or at least I hope it's Vista and not my hard drive. Basically I've set the hard drive to never shut down when idle and never sleep.

But when I'm installing an application or running the "Disk Doctor" within TuneUp Utilities, I hear my hard drive turn off (that power down 1-time click noise) and then my whole system powers off - literally everything turns off.

I then have to turn it back on again, I often have to boot to Safe Mode then reboot from there to get back into normal Vista.

Is this a sign of a Vista problem or one of my hard drives failing? I've never had this issue with Windows XP.

 

[something daft already!!]

I had a similar issue which I found to be caused by memory. Vista is very picky with memory and I have had many issues. I am currently runing 4 matched 1 gb stick. My original config was 3 gb in 2x1gb and 2x512. XP was fine with this, but Vista did not like it, and I would get a clunk, then shutdown of the drives, all drives including DVD, sometimes it would spin up again, but all the same a most worrying situation. I removed one of my ram sticks and swapped it for a 256mb and this resolved the issue. Though memtest did not show errors with the ram, I am guessing it was some sort of Mobo/Vista issue. If you have it, try different ram or borrow some perhaps. It may help.

Although saying that, it could be a dodgy HD or sector, or even hd interface. Run a full disk check (can take several hours) to see if it finds any dodgy sectors and fixes them.