Windows XP Shutdown/Reboot Mayday!

Fellow Geek Gods,

I come to the Alter of Help needing your aid in a time of peril and deep frustration surrounding my PC. I've got a problem that I've read many entries on this site about, as well as other resources, but none of the fixes seem to be affecting my machine. Here's the basic rundown:

Five days ago my computer decided that when I shut it down it would go through the shutdown sequence and power completely off for about 5 seconds. I would then hear a little tell-tale chirp from my motherboard and the computer would automatically power back up and boot. To date nothing I have tried has stopped this, and the only way to shut down the computer is to manually power it off with the P/S switch--not convenient or cool. When I do turn the switch back on after it's been off for a while, the machine does not automatically boot up, and if I push the power button immediately after turning the PSU switch back on it actually won't power up and boot. After hitting the switch I'd say it's about 10 secs or so and then it will power when I push the button. My gut tells me this whole thing is a software rather than hardware issue.

I have read a lot of entries about the basic symptoms (i.e., try to shutdown or go in standby mode, but then the system reboots immediately), and have tried:

- Unchecking the automatic restart box in system properties for startup and recovery

- Checking the motherboard BIOS power management settings to see if something got whacked there

- Going back to a restore point prior to this starting

- Reloading the latest motherboard nForce4 drivers

...and other things, but no dice. I had not loaded a new program on that day, done any major updates, etc. There may have been a MS Defender update that day, but doubt that had anything to do with it since there was no change when I used the restore point.

Does anyone out there have a clue as to where I can look next or suggest something I haven't tried yet? I'm getting desperate and really don't want to have to do a total wipe and reload of Win XP. Would appreciate any thoughts, as I'm at the end of my cluelight trail...

Thanks,

 

Check through the Reboot instead of Shutdown section in the following link.(some of it you've already mentioned trying).

http://aumha.org/win5/a/shtdwnxp.htm

 

Hi Dave, I like the list of suggestions at that website. I was interested in the "wake on" information, but they don't seem to go into much depth.

"Wake on" is pretty much a BIOS setting. Yes, you can remove whatever hardware is triggering it. A lot of motherboard BIOS programs have "wake on" settings as default (my first self-built computer had Wake on Ring enabled, it would start up any time the phone rang (dial-up) ).

As a maybe, I suggest replacing the CMOS battery and disabling any "wake on" listings in the BIOS (checking through the BIOS settings listed in the motherboard manual is usually a lot faster than opening the sub-menus in the BIOS).

I am sure I have seen this problem before, quite a while ago though. The suggestions at the link seem good, I would look at whether they need to be aimed through Windows or the BIOS (and why the BIOS may not be acting correctly, which is the reason for my suggestion of replacing the battery).

Just an afterthought, try updating the drivers for the chipset.

Matt

 

DarthMatta,

don't push your luck . I am sure you would answer a question to the best of your ability the same as we would.


Matt

 

Many thanks, Matt. I'll check out your suggested sources tonight and see what I can find. The CMOS battery is always a possibility, though I've never had one create issues on its way out. Usually it just does as it's supposed to and dies and then none of the settings for the mobo stay in memory until you get a new one. This seems different, though, as the symptoms appeared out of nowhere without anything done (that I'm aware of) by me. Usually I can trace pop-up issues back to some action I took, but haven't found something yet. Will keep looking. Appreciate the feedback. Will let you know what, if anything, I find out.

Cheers!

 

Okay, went to the link and I've tried basically everything there that would apply. No luck. I still haven't tried the CMOS battery change-out, though I don't think that is really it, but hey, could be. Any other suggestions from anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

 

Any errors showing in the Event Viewer that coincide with shutdown times?

 

Post Melt-down follow-up: PSU the cause

Wanted to wrap this post up after the fact to close the loop on the cause of this in order to hopefully help others diagnose a similar problem in the future.

The bottom line is that it turned out to be a failed power supply. I did not fully suspect this at first primarily because my mother board was still receiving some power, as indicated by the on-board LED. I just made the assumption that if that light was on then I had the normal flow of power coming to the board. I was wrong.

Whatever the cause internally to the unit, my Aerocool Turbine Power 550w PSU partially failed, causing the constant reboots upon Windows shutdown and then finally died completely toasted my motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

Not until I had replaced all of these items and attempting a restart (which failed, but the LED on the new board was also lit) that I realized it had to be either the PSU or the power-on switch itself. I got a new Enermax PSU, hooked everything up, and voila! I was good to go again at full power. The price I paid for that failure in both dollars and time was high.

I'm very disappointed in the Aerocool Turbine Power PSU. It initially was getting very good reviews about solid rails, good looks, and modular features, so I got it about 2 years ago. The only issue people were having had to do with a clicking sound coming from a bad batch of internal fans. I contacted Aerocool and they gave me the option of returning the entire unit for a fix or sending me the fan to install myself to save time. I opted for that and it worked great for the next year and half--until now. I went back to Newegg to look at the reviews people have been posting about the unit now and was blown away by the fact that I was reading about EXACTLY what I had just experienced, with people who had owned the unit between about 13 months and 2 years getting exactly the same results--dead PSU, toasted components. Not cool.

I've written Aerocool, and while I would be foolish to expect them to pony up the $650 in components it took me to fix this meltdown, I do expect a new unit that will hopefully not have the same problem, though it won't be going in this computer. Hopefully this post will help someone avoid the problem, and possibly diagnose their own problem since I didn't know you could get partial power from a PSU while it's in the midst of dying.

Cheers,

M2

 

For the benefit of anyone else who's plagued with an intermittent shutdown and reboot problem, don't discount the possibility that your motherboard may have bad capacitors.

Fortunately they're easy to visually identify - just look for any caps (the little cylinders that look like wheat silos) with a brown stain emerging from the top, kinda like a leaky battery.

There was a rash of bad capacitors a few years back, and the problem affected quite a number of different motherboard manufacturers, because many of them used a common supplier for capacitors.

I almost always use Gigabyte boards when I build for customers, and there were many bad boards around the GA-VKML era, around 2002, 2003.

But just yesterday I came across a Soltek board with bad caps. Fortunately I now know where to look but it can be an annoying and frustrating problem if you've never run across it before.