PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

For anything relating to music-making on Windows computers, with lots of FAQs. Moderated by Martin Walker.

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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

OK - I added the noisy fan assembly back. I did notice that during the move some cables had dislodged - USB cables for the extra USB extension I added on the back but they were pressed half in so that could've caused some confusion although I doubt it.

Blew the dust off the system as well, reseated the RAM sticks just in case.

The chipset fan on the mobo had a bit too much dust and that was running the hottest at 60C.

Had it on for about 2 hrs looping some music while I was working on this guitar piece and it was good, but usually these reboots happen unexpectedly so I wouldn't know until I run it longer.

About the dual - I installed one OS, detached the drive, installed the second on the second drive, reattached the drive and I pick drives from the mobo menu by hitting ESC when it is booting.
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by Ant Gamble »

Dual boot

You could just edit the hidden system file C:\BOOT.INI and provide another option pointing to a different partition of physical drive.
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by Martin Walker »

4TrackMadman wrote:I like GAG for boot manager:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Boot-Manager-Disk/GAG-d.shtml

So do I - been using it for years 8-)

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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

OK, issue seemed to have been solved for about a week and here it comes again.

To recap:
2 physically separate drives, on IDE0 WinXP64 (work) drive and on IDE1 WinXP (recording DAW drive).

Now, it gets even stranger as Windows XP (my recording partition) won't boot up when both drives are attached. It would only boot when the other drive (Win XP64) is physically off.

Don't know exactly what happened but on one of the boots the other drive was not found and the system went directly to my recording drive.

In the meantime I actually won a local PC store price drawing for Cinco De Mayo (Mexican Holiday) and I got a 850 watt mammoth power supply.
Strangely enough the drive would power up after I removed the power connector and plugged it back in.

Since there was erratic power action going on I decided to see how things will run with the new power supply - same thing as before.

XP64 (my work drive) boots fine and my recording drive (XP) gets to Windows XP loading screen and reboots the machine.

... I am starting to view my aging Mac laptop with nostalgia ....
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by DragonLogos »

Apart from this problem of which drive boots up, has the is the original problem of the system rebooting now gone / fixed?
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

Hasn't phantom rebooted since.

I did try to start my recording drive with both drives connected and noticed that WinXP will fail right after my fw interface (Presonus Firepod) would light up the sync light. So just for fun I shutdown the fw interface and rebooted, WinXP on my recording drive came up fine, so it looks like the Firepod is acting up on boot.

So it is possible that it was the cause of the phantom reboot, maybe recent windows updates and the Firepod are acting up.

I just so miss the analog 4 track days - this crap has eaten 4 hrs of my day today :frown:
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

oh great, we're back to phantom rebooting again.
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

OK, apparently I managed to isolate the phantom reboot issue to having both drives connected. When the work drive (XP64) is unpowered I can get in the DAW recording drive and it won't reboot.

Getting weirder by the second. Looks like mobo to me since both are on IDE, although on different channels.

I'll run memtest just to verify, if worse comes to worse, I at least have a stable recording installation when the other drive is off so I'll have to keep it physically unpowered, the case at least is with a latch that opens fairly easy.
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

I installed brand new 750 watt PSU over the weekend, apparently it got lost in the thread.

So you think the XP64 is acting up as that one not coming up initially got things acting weird?

At this point I am thinking either on of the drives, mobo or IDE controller.

I have a spare controller too so I might pop that one in there just to see how things will act up.

It's not the PSU for sure.
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by 4TrackMadman »

Disconnected my "work" drive and so far everything is booting fine in the recording drive, 3 days in a row.
The work drive also boots fine when it is by itself.
When I have both connected the work drive boots fine and the recording drive boots about 1 out of 3 times when the recording audio interface is off during boot. Really strange but same boot problem happens either when I use GAG installed on the work drive or when I boot from the mobo boot manager.
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Re: PC phantom reboot - can't find the cause

Post by DragonLogos »

Could you maybe get the exact model of the Motherboard, I know there were some issues with nVidia and Western Digital - Also there were some issues with nVidia... but that's another story, and if its working with one drive I do not think that is coming into play
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