Spontaneous reboots - caused by HDD ?

Question

My PC would occasionally restart itself, at any time regardless of what program I might be in. I've solid virus/spyware protection, so ruled those out.

Over a year these sudden reboots became more frequent, till it would almost start rebooting in middle of a reboot!  
Useless, so... I switched the HD (with all my data) to another PC (which had always worked fine). I also made a fresh partition on it where I installed a fresh XP-SP2 plus minimal software, leaving all the original data (including original XP, no longer "active") on the original partition.

All seemed well - so I figured somehow the motherboard in #1 PC must have been at fault.

But now, occasionally, I find PC#2 doing the same thing. :-(

Question - is it possible/likely that either some data, or SOMETHING associated directly with a physical HD, could cause something like this - random reboots ?

zaskie · Accepted Answer

random rebooting on a computer its most likely to be caused by bad RAM memory

But since you'd tested the HD on another computer, it might be due to some error on the OS installed or bad sectors, 

i suggest you do a low level format to detect bad sectors and see if that fixed the problem

PsychProf · Answer

Its possible that there is some malicious software that does this and is resident on your harddrive.

The other things that might cause this are:
Overheating (check that the fan is working and that things are clean inside);

Bad power supply (its possible that your computer is underpowered or power supply going bad)

Bad memory (run memtest86 from memtest86.com or the one off the Microsoft website, under online crash analysis)


Go to System Properties > Under Startup and Recovery Settings > Un-check Automatically restart under System failure.

Then when you computer reboots go to Control Panel > Performance and Maintenance > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer and see if you can see anything awry there or post the data to a forum and ask someone to interpret it for you.

Anonymous · Answer

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vamsee · Answer

First of all, what computer is it?? is it a DELL?? If it is a DELL, then the hard drive can be tested for its viability! Depending on the model of the DELL comp, u do have certain methods that can test the hard drive and tell u whether it has gone bad or not!! and if it is still under warranty, then u better contact DELL asap! u don't wanna miss out on a replacement, do u?

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Spontaneous reboots - caused by HDD ?

4 Answers