I have a home-built system only 3 months old. The exact components are identical to a friend of mine's pc (other than the video card) and his system doesn't have this issue (fyi...I've swapped out the video card and still have the issue). I initially got a "Your system has recovered from a serious error" message after a random restart. Since then, I no longer get that message, but my pc randomly blue screens, restarts, and brings me to that menu where I can choose safe mode, safe mode with networking, restart normally, etc. I've successfully done all three of those options in the past and gotten back into windows. However, I've had a number of cases where none of them has worked...I select one and it almost immediately blue screens and restarts (sometimes I get the "windows" screen with the moving status bar for a few seconds, then it blue screens and restarts). Here's what I've found:
- All drivers and bios are the latest updates.1. Once I get into "restart mode", there is no way to get windows going. It will be an endless loop of restarting, choosing an option from the menu (safe mode, etc), and then restarting.
- If my machine keeps restarting, I have to kill the power and wait at least an hour before I can get back into windows. To me, this seems like an overheating issue.
- I've done exhaustive memory and hard drive tests...everything comes up fine (memtest and manufacturer supplied hard drive utilities).
- The last time I was in restart mode, I shut everything down and unplugged all of my hard drives, cd drives, usb/firewire interfaces, etc until all that was left was my main drive, the video card, and my two 1gb sticks of memory (again, this memory is the exact same memory as in my buddy's machine which works fine). With nothing but this bare-bones system, I still got the same result.
- Since unplugging everything except the core parts, I've been running stress tests with Prime95 and CoreTemp with logging turned on. This has run for as long as 15 hours without an issue and with my highest core temp only reaching 48C (I have an intel core 2 quad cpu Q6600@2.4ghz). I've also looked at the temps of my other drives (when they were still plugged in) and video card and they all looked fine.
I'm about to plug everything back in and run the stress test again, but I can't pinpoint what the problem is. I've turned off the option to restart after a system error (based on info I read in this forum) but I haven't looked at any dumps. I think it's very strange that my problem is solved if I wait a period of time. To me, that removes the chance that it's a driver error or some other kind of software problem. My main drive is brand new without any detectable problems and my memory done fine when tested. Could this be my power supply or just a bad cpu (even though the temp looks ok)? OH...one other strange thing...the other day when I kept doing restarts and trying different things I got into a situation when, even after I would hold down the power button on my case and power down, it would power itself back on after about 5 seconds...there was no way for me to shut it down without killing the power on my actual power supply. That's about all I can think of. If you need to know my exact components, let me know. I'll update this once I plug everything back in and run more stress tests. Just fyi...I have an asus pk5 premium/wifi motherboard with the wifi disabled (and the latest bios installed). Thanks.
Start Free Trial
