Some Help/Advice PC randomly shuts down/restarts - not overheating.

A

abadon

New member
Hi All,
a week ago my pc started to randomly shut down and reboot itself. it shuts down and about 10 sec later restarts. i monitored the temps and all where in normal range around 33C. This got worse to the point where it would not switch on at the pwr-button. I had not installed any progs during this time and checked for any virus or malware and there was none.

Yesterday it died totally, but after about 20min restarted. So this is what i did.
Removed everything, cleaned and re-seated all components except the CPU, thinking that as i live at the coast the high
humidity may have something to do with it. It started first shot but reported win boot mgr failure. I tried to fix this but with no luck, eventually thinking the SSD that win10 was installed on had packed up i removed it, used another drive and started from scratch by re-installing win7-64.

As of now it runs perfectly and has not rebooted or shut down randomly by itself at all.

Question:
What caused this, is something failing, anyone have such an experience before and how was the fix?

My specs:
Asus P8z77-VPro, Intel i7 3770K, Corsairs 16Gig Ram,GTX760 GraphicsCard, Corsair HX750 PSU.(not overclocked)

Any advice much appreciated.
 
PsychoFish said:
Sounds like your OS bugged out
Click to expand...

Surely that wouldn't cause the machine not to switch on. Thinking more physical drive related. Had one occasion where a drive was buggered to point of machine wont turn on with it plugged in.


Try plugging your SSD in (as a secondary, ie dont boot from it) and see what happens. then if you can, see if you can run a chkdsk on it (both its root drive and "system reserved" drive). boot mgr failing can possibly mean corruption on the system reserved drive.

If its not a hardware issue thats fixed by going to startup repair (either using a 10 iso or launching startup repair (spam F8 i believe)), going into advanced options and going to command prompt and then rebuilding the MBR with bootrec /fixmbr /fixboot command. You MIGHT need a recovery disc to get this going, you MIGHT be able to do it within the startup repair.
 
The initial reboot/not starting up issue was probably a hardware seating issue with RAM/GFX/SATA/power not making proper contact on the mobo. As components heat up/cool down there is a little bit of flex in them, and if the contacts are not seated properly this can cause them to disconnect causing system crashes. I had the same issue with my GFX card a while back. Taking everything out and installing it again fixed the seating issue.

The random crash/restarts possibly corrupted something in your windows causing the boot mgr failure. The same happened to me. A startup repair run from your install media should be able to fix this.
 
Could have been a short on the motherboard due to dust or something stuck somewhere. (Cleaning everything out was the major headache solver in my opinion)

With the sudden shut downs, the boot sector prob got buggered. (The clean install fixed that)

I once had a screw that was stuck underneath the mobo and caused random reboots.
 
What are your CPU and GPU temps that you say it is not overheating?
Is it beeping and then restarting or just random restart ?
 
Have you tried turning it off and on again?

i would start with [MENTION=22653]Avantar[/MENTION] 's suggestion, a good cleaning at least annually does wonders for the PC, Make sure all the components are seated firmly. It might be worthwhile placing some fresh heat paste between the CPU and heat sink.

Failing all that, make back-ups of whatever you don't wanna lose (amorous pics from Bokkie) and format.
 
Try and take apart all hardware - Remove CPU, Ram, GPU and all power cables, reinsert them. If more than 1 ram module is used, start off by only using 1 module.

Also note that too much thermal paste can also cause issues (Restart machine or in some cases even prohibits you machin from starting up).

Borrow some RAM and a PSU from a friend. It will be any one of the 2 in most cases.
 
Have/had the same problem. My computer randomly freezes and restarts whenever it feels like it. Sometimes it won't even turn on, but confirmed that it isn't the memory or anything overheating... Starting to suspected the HDD
 
Disclaimer - if you break your pc doing the below, dont call me, these instructions are for people who have built a pc at least once.
:)

For reasons for random reboots please consider the following:
Have you made any recent changes in terms of software or hardware ?
Software > newly installed applications might be crashing windows, a hotfix might be causing problems, etc.
Hardware > newly installed hardware might be causing issues like a graphics card thats plugged into a very under powered PSU, memory might be the issue, the motherboard might be failiing (I remember replacing motherboards on a batch of HP pcs where the capacitors would blow up like baloons and the pc would either randomly reboot or get slower and slower until it crashed and would eventually no longer boot up.

Other considerations if you havent made any hardware or software changes recently:
clean out the pc, dust can get into the heatsink fins and block airflow causing chips to overheat and the computer is crashing to save the chips from burning out, look into adding extra airflow. A good idea is to open the side panel on the pc and letting a desktop fan blow into it and test the pc then to see if it still crashes, if it stops, you might have a overheating issue.
Ive had issues where a heatsink was no longer making contact with a CPU, buy new thermal paste, clean both the top of the CPU and the bottom of the heatsink to a mirror finnish and then apply the thermal paste, secure the heatsink back onto the CPU and test the pc to see if it still crashes.
Believe it or not, ive see a faulty USB port reboot a pc when flashdrives or cables are plugged into it, swap currently plugged in devices to other USB ports to test (this was back in 2004, might no longer be a consideration)
To test memory you get several free linux live distros that lets you boot into a ram tester to see if its ram causing the reboot.
If your reboots are purely due to software, generally speaking, event viewer is your friend. Straight after a crash, open up eventviewer and see what you find in the system and application logs, error codes can tell you exactly what gets loaded or what failed before the OS crashed. I think what else might be a good consideration but I would start by looking at what was done before the crashes started, new updates or software or hardware changes.
 
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