Hardware problem?

[Joshrandom]

I seem to have some sort of problem with my old P4 at the moment, I was wondering if someone here, with more experience of such things, could point me in the right direction.

Early Saturday morning I was using the PC to browse the web (I was reading a page of text on Live Journal) when WindowsXP froze. I reset the machine, but as it booted back into Windows it just reset itself. After a while I gave up, switched it off and went to bed. Saturday afternoon I worked on it some more, and after a few hours toil I got it working again (I had to uninstall the ATI drivers for my HD3850 GPU, and then reinstall them again).

But now the problem is back, and I can't even get it to boot into safe mode. It just reboots continuously, while emitting a strange and rather worrying tinkling noise. I guess that the fault could be with Windows, and I may need to do a format and reinstall, but I suspect that there is either a fault with the HD3850 or possibly the power supply, is there anyway that I might be able to track the fault down?

Oh, and my other PC (a Quad running Ubuntu) is incompatible with the AGP HD3850, so I can't just swap it around. If the fault is with the PSU then swapping the graphics card for the old, less power hungry one, probably won't prove anything either.    :evil:

Any ideas?

[UBT - Mikee]

Sounds suspiciously like a PSU fault or hard drive. 2 things come to mind.

First 'tinkling sound'. Is it possible that the PSU fan is catching on the guard? Can you feel the air coming out of the fan? I doubt if this is the fault as the PSU should just shut down when it overheats.

I've heard 'tinkling sounds' as components overheat (put simply - overheat = internal break, cool down = circuit works again). If it's the smoothing capacitors or the rectifier bridges this may cause one or more of the output rails to drop. Though the system would tend to just shut down rather than freeze.

As you've got 2 PCs you've got 2 PSUs! If they're modern ones with the necessary connections take the good one and swap it in. There's only 4 screws holding the PSUs in and you can't plug in the cables the wrong way round. That should prove a PSU fault.

I had a similar fault a few months ago - you haven't got a SATA hard drive by any chance? That's what caused my fault then. Windoze froze as the hard drive was not reading/writing. I let it cool down and while it was working managed to transfer everything across to another drive before it packed up again.

[Rockinfroggi]

I've had similar on 2 P4's since the weather got hot, mine were due to being lazy and not cleaning my CPU coolers and renewing the thermal compound.
I had no tinkle though.

Gary

[Joshrandom]

Sounds suspiciously like a PSU fault or hard drive. 2 things come to mind.

First 'tinkling sound'. Is it possible that the PSU fan is catching on the guard? Can you feel the air coming out of the fan? I doubt if this is the fault as the PSU should just shut down when it overheats.

I've heard 'tinkling sounds' as components overheat (put simply - overheat = internal break, cool down = circuit works again). If it's the smoothing capacitors or the rectifier bridges this may cause one or more of the output rails to drop. Though the system would tend to just shut down rather than freeze.

As you've got 2 PCs you've got 2 PSUs! If they're modern ones with the necessary connections take the good one and swap it in. There's only 4 screws holding the PSUs in and you can't plug in the cables the wrong way round. That should prove a PSU fault.

I had a similar fault a few months ago - you haven't got a SATA hard drive by any chance? That's what caused my fault then. Windoze froze as the hard drive was not reading/writing. I let it cool down and while it was working managed to transfer everything across to another drive before it packed up again.

Thanks Mikee, well the fans on the PSU are certainly working, and that worrying tinkling noise didn't seem to correspond to any read/write operations to the HDD, although I think a backup may be a good place to start. I should also mention that the 'tinkling noise' is not constant, but it does immediately precede an sudden reboot of the machine.

The initial problem was just XP freezing up, but since then the problem has been continual restarts. Bare in mind that this machine has been running for 24/7 for a number of years, and frankly doesn't like being switched off. I am wondering if the crash and reboot has corrupted some important files in Windows, since the initial fault seems quite different to what's happening now, hmm.

As for swapping PSUs, well that's an option, just not one I'm keen on trying, lol, at least not just yet. Although I didn't get too much time to play around with it yesterday, I did get it going again, although I'm not using the GPU to crunch with at the moment (I need to reinstall the .net framework 1.1 windows component in order to get the ATI Catalyst software working). I guess I'll have to see if it can keep going till this evening first though.

I've had similar on 2 P4's since the weather got hot, mine were due to being lazy and not cleaning my CPU coolers and renewing the thermal compound.
I had no tinkle though.

Gary

Thanks Gary, it may well be a thermal problem, although I did take both my PC's apart and gave them a good blow out a couple of weeks ago (liberating a few years worth of dust and dog hair). Hmm, I guess the first thing to do will be to open it up and check all the fans etc, and see if I can figure out where the tinkling is coming from.

James.

[Temujin]

The initial problem was just XP freezing up, but since then the problem has been continual restarts.

I've had that sort of behaviour from bad ram sticks. I had a pair of 1gig sticks that no matter which machine I put them in, would result in either a freeze or sequential reboot after 2-3 hours. I ended up binning them

Its easy to test, replace all memory if you can with known good stuff or pull 1 stick at a time and see if the problem persists.

I've no idea what the tinkling sound could be though

[Jeffers]

I had a graphics card die on me that stopped the PC booting. Is it possibly the graphis card fan that's prodcing the "tinkling". If you've still got an old grahics card lying about the place, it's a fairly quick swap to see if that's the problem.

[melter65]

Just a thought, could the 'tinkling' be fan bearings on their way out in your PSU fan?

[Joshrandom]

I've had that sort of behaviour from bad ram sticks.

Another possibility, although it doesn't fully explain my machine's problem. Although I haven't been able to spend as much time on this as I'd have liked, and probably won't be able to work on it before the weekend, I have gotten it to boot into safe mode, and then used system restore to get XP working normally again (only without the ATI Catalyst software running). This appears to be stable, and will happily crunch a CPDN WU on the CPU, however as soon as I install Catalyst and restart I get the intermittent tinkling and then the reboot cycle begins again.

I've no idea what the tinkling sound could be though

That's the bit that's really got me worried.  :?

I had a graphics card die on me that stopped the PC booting. Is it possibly the graphis card fan that's prodcing the "tinkling". If you've still got an old grahics card lying about the place, it's a fairly quick swap to see if that's the problem.

Well I now think that the problem is either with the graphics card (the fan on the card will be the first thing I check when I get the cover off), or else with Windows itself. The HD3850 work's perfectly as a graphics card, I just can't crunch with it anymore.  :(

Just a thought, could the 'tinkling' be fan bearings on their way out in your PSU fan?

I did wonder that, but the PSU fan already makes a lot of noise, only it's a continuous drone where as the noise I've been describing as 'tinkling', seems to occur as windows is starting up and loading drivers, and just before the reboot cycle begins.

Thanks for all the advice guys. As soon as things have settled down here, and I have the time to play around, I'll let you know what I find.

James.

[UBT - Mikee]

Time for a sweepstake then!

I still reckon it's the Hard drive.
Gary reckons it needs a good clean.
John reckons RAM modules.
Jeffers says Graphics card.
Melter65 goes for PSU.

So who wants to go for the following?
Case, Motherboard, CPU, Optical and other drives, any software, something else.

No prizes other than the kudos of being the UKBT fixer of all things!

[Ben]

Time for a sweepstake then!

I still reckon it's the Hard drive.
Gary reckons it needs a good clean.
John reckons RAM modules.
Jeffers says Graphics card.
Melter65 goes for PSU.

So who wants to go for the following?
Case, Motherboard, CPU, Optical and other drives, any software, something else.

No prizes other than the kudos of being the UKBT fixer of all things!

Just for bet sakes, i'll put the hobnobs on the GPU. (Melted chocolate anyone?)

[Joshrandom]

Time for a sweepstake then!

I still reckon it's the Hard drive.
Gary reckons it needs a good clean.
John reckons RAM modules.
Jeffers says Graphics card.
Melter65 goes for PSU.

So who wants to go for the following?
Case, Motherboard, CPU, Optical and other drives, any software, something else.

No prizes other than the kudos of being the UKBT fixer of all things!

I'm feeling vaguely optimistic, so software for me please.  :?

[Joshrandom]

Well it's been a rough few weeks for reasons I don't care to go into, and I'm afraid the broken P4 has been at the bottom of my list of priorities. However I've now had the chance to spend some time on the problem, and although it's still early days, it does now appear to be working reliably again *fingers crossed*.  

Now for the sweepstake results....

When I took the case off and switched the PC on I found that all the fans, while noisy, were working (at this point the PC wasn't even getting as far as successfully loading the BIOS before rebooting). The tinkling noise I reported above, wasn't actually a tinkling noise at all, but instead it was a rather alarming electrical discharge noise coming from the PSU, so I switched it back off again quick smart.

One new, and more powerful PSU later, and the PC booted into Windows without any problem, however I still couldn't get the Catalyst software to function properly. After a few hours of uninstalling and reinstalling the various versions of the software, I realised that the .Net framework Windows components were hopelessly corrupted, and so I was forced to format the HDD and reinstall XP.  :roll:

With a fresh install everything now seems to be working again, and my ATI GPU is once again busily crunching Milkyway WUs.  :D

So, since the main problem was the PSU (causing the crash that corrupted the operating system), it would seem that the title of 2009 'UKBT fixer of all things' goes to melter65.  :cheers:

But seriously, thanks to everyone for their suggestions, and I guess that I should count myself very lucky that the dodgy PSU didn't do more damage.  :?

James.

[Ben]

Good to hear you finally solved it! Looks like melter is this months techie of the month  

[Temujin]

it was probably the dodgy memory that blew the PSU

Well done James :thumbup: