2000 Professional Random reboot

In my experience the MOST COMMON cause for this is BAD RAM.  Please remove all the RAM and get a new or other known good device installed.  If the problem goes away, then you have your solution.

This advice presumes that you are not doing anything foolish like overclocking the CPU, memory, or other parts of your system.  If so, back off to rated speeds until you rule this out as a cause.

Also check that all your cards are W2K supported and that the drivers are up to date.

If it's RAM OR Power Supply, you may not get the BSOD, it may continue to reboot or it will just hang(freeze) on you.

Give us a short description of the machine along with software you are running and also any changes you may had made recently (last two or three weeks) including removing/adding hardware/software.

Thanks.

Ok, I'll try but remember I had no reboot episode when in safe mode!  

>>Ok, I'll try but remember I had no reboot episode when in safe mode!

That is of no consequence.  Safe mode is intended to be, well, safe...  

PC Clone Abit BX-6 mainboard 512 memory maxtor hard dr, ati @ home video sony cdr soundblaster.  Win 2000 prof all updates, outlook IE 6.0.  

About safe mode, safe mode cannot control memory or power supply.  I'm going to run defrag now since I have turned off the reboot.  More later.

OK here it is BSOD:

STOP 0X00000000A (OXB05487FA,0X0000001C,0X00000000, 0X8046875D)

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

ADDRESS BASE 8046875d BASE AT 80400000

DATE STAMP 3AD7AD60-NTOSKRNL.EXE

BEGIN DUMP OF PHYSICAL MEMORY.  CONTACT ADMINISTRATION.....

Here are several MS KB articles that may point you in the right direction

http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q165863
http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q278945
http://support.microsoft.com/search/preview.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q315377


The Crazy One

In my experience the MOST COMMON cause for this is BAD RAM.  Please remove all the RAM and get a new
or other known good device installed.  If the problem goes away, then you have your solution.

This advice presumes that you are not doing anything foolish like overclocking the CPU, memory, or other
parts of your system.  If so, back off to rated speeds until you rule this out as a cause.

Also check that all your cards are W2K supported and that the drivers are up to date.

OK I hear you but I did not have this problem when I first installed Win 2000.  I quess the memory could be going bad, but it still does not explain why it does not happen in safe mode.  If the memory was bad it should do it in safe mode, right?

I tend to believe along the driver area since safe mode loads minimal amount of drivers.

How do I temp eliminate startup drivers since there's no msconfig in win 2000?

Stardotstar did you take a look at the links I provided. The IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL problem seems to be recurring theme in the Win2000 and XP forum lately. And for the most part those that have had this problem found that it was either related to a device and/or its drivers causing the problem.

Here are a few utilities that will help identify what is runing at startup.

StartupCop
http://web.zdnet.com/pcmag/pctech/content/18/08/ut1808.007.html

StartStop
http://www.tfi-technology.com/downloads.htm

For Win 2000
or this one courtesy of expert tonnybrandt
http://www.techadvice.com/win2000/m/msconfig_w2k.htm 

MSCONFIG for Win 2000
http://www.insideproject.com/guides/showguide.cfm?guideid=31
http://www.insideproject.com/downloads/msconfig2k/msconfig.zip

Also open up the Serviec manager

Start > Run services.msc

You can disable services from running through the use of this utility. However be very careful what you disable. If you don't know for sure what a sevice does then don't mess with it.

Yes, thanks I'm trying to look at all and test.

Thanks

I've had a lot of bad experiences with Service Pack 2.

It's rebooting spontaneously and it genereates some weird error in the app.logs.
Whenever I run scandisk, defrag, virusscan or when I even try to open a message with a big attachment in Outlook.
When using OWA (Outlook WebAccess) I get the same error, but then only IE crashes.

It's not bad ram, nor bad disks or whatever. I experienced the problem with a Dell 4100, a compaq and a generic Athlon system.

I reinstalled the machines without sp 2 and they are running fine now. (You can probably just uninstall the service packs, but I prefer nice and clean).

Thanks, I think I have done a 2 punch approach to stabilizing.  

First I removed all memory and cleaned the contacts and replaced in a different order.  Next, I removed some "Moviestar" files that defrag kept indicating were still defragged. Next, I removed that program and rebooted.

Ran defrag in normal mode, several times, and all has ran well since then.  Extremely stable again

Problem now is the awarding of the points.

Did you recently CHANGE a device in your system. I had this same error this weekend after upgrading my video card. I went from an ATI Rage PRO 32MB RAM up to a Radeon 7000 64 MB ram.

Anyways, I booted to safe mode, uninstalled the Rage Pro, re-installed the radeon. Rebooted. Got the IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL error message. SO I removed the card card, reboted and let windows detect it, browsed to the drivers on the original cd and all has been well since.

The reason I think it may NOT be service pak 2 is because we have over 1000 machines at my work all running service pak2 with no known issues....

The first time I installed it(the Radeon video card) I used "udated" drivers from ATI's support website. ATI's drivers suck. Just so you all know how I feel about ATI's driver programmers. The hardware itself is awesome, the drivers make their products above average at best. SO, I would say boot to safe mode, uninstall the video card, reboot and let windows re-detect the card,when it asks for drivers, browse to the original cdrom you received with the video card ( I find these are always more stable than their so called "upgrades" which, in my experience, introduce more bugs than they fix). Leave these drivers on for a few days and see if that error returns.

Cheers.

PS-CrazyOne:

"For Win 2000
or this one courtesy of expert tonnybrandt
http://www.techadvice.com/win2000/m/msconfig_w2k.htm"


Tell Tonny to use the msconfig version from WinXP and it works perfectly. No errors generated while starting it and the WinXP specific options are present but greyed out and inaccessible. Everything else works perfectly.

Thanks, but as I stated in the earlier post all appears to be well now.  Here's what I did.

I first stsrated having this issue after installing Moviesatr a software used with Dazzle board.  I found a work around on the Dazzle site for the reboot.

Problem got worse and I tried to defrag in normal mode but computer kept rebooting.  I was able to defrag in safe mode but it kept telling me that some movie files in the Moviestar data directory were not defragged.

I removed these files and the program.  Also, and unfortunately at the same time, I also pulled my memory and cleaned the contacts.

The machine has run perfectly ever since then.

That's all I can tell you.  May eat my words when I go home today but I don't think so because I spent about 12 hours on it yesterday without a single reboot.

I want to think that the unstable situation was due to the defragmented files, but cannot proove it.

Whatever, my post was just cautionary. As long as it's fixed thats the main thing. For future reference the msconfig.exe utility from windows XP runs just fine on windows 2000 and may help out in the troubleshooting of these situations and especially bootup situations.

I am accepting this answer because without this process I would not have figured out the error message.

Thanks to all!  PLease understand I appreciated al of the suggestions.