Yet Another Computer Crash Question

Factual Questions
1

My computer has crashed (fails to boot) and I’m stuck as to what to do. Computer had been working fine (for the most part) up to this point, but there was one game that would occasionally lock up the system and cause me to have to reboot. I thought maybe the game crash had corrupted some boot files, but now I’m not so sure. Let me give a chronology of how things have deteriorated to help the diagnosis.

**Monday Day ** - PC working fine, game crashes PC, I reboot and everything is OK. I leave PC and go downstairs

**Monday PM ** - on my way to bed, I see the PC has rebooted while I was away from it and is stuck on POST (power on self test, has detected all my drives and shown the devices/IRQs) screen with error message “Unable to Load Operating System” (let’s call this UtLOS since we’ll see this a lot). I try rebooting, turning off power, etc, etc - every reboot ends with POST - UtLOS. I’m tired, I go to bed.

**Tues AM ** - I have a couple minutes before leaving for work, so I throw in the WinXP Install CD, change bios to boot off CD/DVD (bios sees my 3 HD and DVD drive OK BTW). Get “Press any key to boot from CD” message, press the any key and PC boots from CD. My choices are to Install XP or go to Recovery Console. I choose recovery console and get a C:>. Have no idea what to do now, and am late for work so I shut down and figure to have a go after work.

**Tues early PM ** - Short time between dinner and soccer for PC repair, but I had printed some instructions for the Recovery Console so I thought I’d get started. Now when I get the “Press any key to boot from CD”, pressing keys does not cause it to boot from CD. It just times out and tries to boot from HDD - causing UtLOS and much hair pulling. I notice now occasionally when I turn the PC off and back on it fails to boot to the BIOS/POST screen. Hmmmm. Powering down and back up fixes this problem.

**Tues late PM/early AM ** - Back from soccer I get back to it. Still unable to boot off the CD, the frequency off non Bios/POST boot occurences is increasing. Could this be a Power Supply problem? I have a spare 300 Watt PS, but learn to my dismay it does not have the ATX2 connector. (Is this essential? Or could I throw it in the machine anyway and power the MB and Hard drive?) I try disconnecting all drives except the C; drive to try to conserve power, but no go. Frequency of Non BIOS/POST boots continues to increase until PC will not start at all. At this point I give up.
Current PS is a 450 watt model that is fairly new (6 monthish, definitely < 1 year), but is on off brand (Chiefmax I think, I’m at work now). Could this have failed so soon? Would a dying PS give me an UtLOS message, or do I have multiple problems?

System is P4 2.6 Ghz (I forget the MB brand name/model, but have it at home if needed), 450 Watt PS, 3 HDDs (C; drive is 80 GB) and a DVD drive. Video Card is Radeon 9600xt and I have 2 Gb (4 x 512) of RAM. Sound and Network capabilities off the MB.

Any help/ideas appreciated.
Thanks in advance for all replies.

2

Try reseating all of your components to the motherboard especially the RAM. Check all cables.

Do you think it is heat related or were some of these boots after a long rest?

3

The non boot to Bios/POST definitely happens more often when I’m starting and restarting alot. But it’s hard to believe any heat could build up with the case wide open and nothing running but a POST screen.

When I get home tonight I can get some data on restarts after a long break and see if it gets worse. Can do on the reseating.

4

If the CPU heatsink is loose, or the fan not running, the CPU can overheat very quickly.

5

I’d put money on the PSU. The increasing severity definitely points to a hardware component becoming increasingly unstable, and more often than not I’ve traced this to a bum power supply – and the vast majority of those times it has been a cheap $20 import. Other possibilities include motherboard (or more accurately one of its components), CPU, or the hard drive or one of the devices attached to the same IDE chain as the boot drive. (If you have the CD-ROM attached to the same chain as your boot drive, this becomes a greater possibility, as the death or illness of one component tends to make the other one react in a kind of sympathetic way – detatching the bum device will usually set the other back to right) These alternative possibilities are probably less likely than my primary suspect, though. And I wouldn’t be surprised at a cheap PSU dying in under a year. I see more that die before their first birthday than survive it.

Assuming that the PSU is the culprit there remains the possibility of collateral damage. These PSUs don’t supply the cleanest, most stable power to begin with, and the inconstant current provided by these things usually gets worse over time, resulting in greater amounts of system instability issues as the PSU thrashes about in its death throes. A side effect of this can be writeback cache failures on the hard drive from current fluctuations outside normal tollerances resulting in data loss and/or corruption. Another possible side effect – though rare in my experience – is that the PSU may end up burning itself out. Even if the machine isn’t on. I just had my work computer do that. New machine, installed two days ago. Used it for one hour after setting up before I left work, then shut down. Came back the next morning to an office filled with the wonderful aroma of charred electronics and a stone-dead PC. Mmmm. Barbecue.

If you have a spare, try plugging a different PSU in and see if it begins booting again like normal. If it ends out fixing the problem, go and get yourself a half-decent PSU that’ll live for several birthdays. Enermax, Thermaltake, Antec – even Nyko have been very good to me.

6

My MB has the ATX1 and ATX2 sockets. Can I plug in a PS that only has the ATX1 connector? What does ATX2 power? I checked my MB manual last night but it doesn’t say.

7

If it’s what I’m thinking, ATX2 has an extra four pins that provide additional voltage to the motherboard. (IIRC, ATX2 is also known as a “P4 connector”) Pretty well every PSU with a P4 connector separates it from the main ATX connector so that it can be used on boards that don’t use it.

If your board requires a P4 connector it will not even POST if the connector isn’t plugged in.

8

Roger that. The ATX4 is 4 pins, away from the main connector. Looks like I’ll need a new PS before I can even diagnose the non-boot problem (or hopefully it will also fix the non-boot problem).

Oh, btw - the DVD drive is on a seperate IDE drive from the Boot HDD.

9

OK, you’ve got to the C: prompt. Were you prompted for a password? If so, it means that the security part of the registry is intact.

The first thing to do is run CHKDSK C:, then check to see that you’ve got a decent amount of free space (100 MB or so should be plenty, but 1 GB+ is preferable) using DIR and reboot. This cures many ills.

If your work computer runs XP, look up the help for the Recovery Console. You’re likely going to need to use one or more of bootcfg, fixmbr, and fixboot. Tread very carefully. If there’s data on the disk you want to keep, then make a copy of the disk first using Maxblast, Ghost, or similar. And work on the copy. If your motherboard’s BIOS supports RAID 1 (mirroring) then you can use that to make the copy, but be careful as to which way you’re making the mirror (BTDTGTTS).

10

No. But I don’t have any passwords on the system (it does normally give a password prompt when XP boots, but I just hit return). And I couldn’t do anything from the C: prompt. Not even a DIR (it gave an error message but I forgot what it was). I did change to D: and then did a DIR and it responded, so it wasn’t the command but the drive. But the thing is now- I can’t even get back to a C: prompt. I can’t even boot off the CD!

11

Oddly enough, having the case wide open can result in overheating of your CPU.

The heat isn’t just there to ‘build up’, it is generated by the CPU as it operates. Many cases are designed so that the fan pulls air into the case, runs it past the CPU heat sink, and blows it out the back side. With the case open, this air pathway is disrupted, and the case fan can’t pull the stream of air by the CPU to cool it. So the CPU has to depend on passive air circulation, which may not be enough.

Also, “nothing running but the POST screen” doesn’t mean much. Your CPU is always running, either executing instructions, or in a do-nothing wait loop. So it’s operating, and generating heat, all the time. That the screen isn’t changing, just sitting waiting for your input, doesn’t matter – the CPU’s still running.

The exception to this is some of the modern power-saving options on systems. Depending on settings, they can actually put the CPU in a quiescent state where is either not running or running at a reduced state. But if you’re sitting at a POST screen, you probably don’t have the power-saver routines running yet.

12

Took a few days to get a PS and here is the latest:

Same problem - UtLOS. However, I found if I change the boot order of the disks, I can get the system to boot off the CD. So it appears my C: drive is hosed. From a DOS prompt I tried a DIR (error) and then CHKDSK. CHKDSK gives: “It appears this drive has unrecoverable errors”. So it appears the drive is hosed. Is weird that you need an “unhosed” drive to boot off a CD. Thanks Bill.

Didn’t attempt to reformat the drive. I guess that’s next. Unless anyone has ideas of how to get data off it? There’s probably nothing on it I can’t afford to lose, but there are a lot of programs with years of updates and updated drivers that will have to be redone.

About re-installing Win XP. Can I install it on one of my other drives w/out losing all the info on that drive? Or should I just get another HD? I realize I’ll have to reinstall all the programs on my D and E drives, but at least the files will still be there and sometimes reinstalling over existing programs can save some user settings and such.

13

This is bad news but not necessarily fatal. Try listening to the disk. Does it go ‘Click, click’? If so, this is fatal, so chuck it and buy a new one. Otherwise, find another PC and put the drive in as a secondary drive (you could also put it in a USB enclosure), boot that, and tell us what you see. You may be able to check the disk successfully via the GUI - NTFS is very resilient. If that doesn’t work, look in the Event Viewer (right-click My Computer, select Manage) and report what you find in the System Log and the Application Log.

14

I finally broke down and took the drive to a local shop. The data was lost but the drive was recoverable.

The weirdest thing of this whole situation was not being able to boot from CD. Turns out I needed to press a key, and my wireless keyboard was not active (which is also weird because it is active earlier in the boot sequence, to get into BIOS). Getting a PS/2 adapter for old keyboard and connecting it directly enabled me to boot from CD and get things squared away. Extremely frustrating weekend. Weird also that certain combination of drives booted directly from CD with no prompt to press a key.