Yup. Just as the title says...
When I built my new PC a few months ago, I carried over my case, with the power supply, and hard disks which I was using before. Perhaps I should have spent the extra dough up front and got new drives and a power supply, but why would I have to? They all seemed to be working well at the time, and had never given me a problem before. Anyway, the system kept crashing while in Trainz. I initially thought it was bad video drivers, DirectX versus Open/GL, etc., I updated to the latest ones for NVidia, which didn't help so I reinstalled Trainz, and everything ran fine afterwards. Then last Friday, while in the middle of editing a session, my system rebooted! Huh? What!? I checked the Event Viewer and saw nothing. There was no mention of what happen, which means that the OS didn't have a chance to write anything to the event log. This is not a good thing because it makes finding the problem more difficult. It seems that when problems strike, I get the nasty ones.
After that reboot, I then went back into Trainz and everything was fine for the rest of the day. Saturday was fine until later in the evening when the system rebooted again on me while on the web. At this point, I thought there was a script virus. Those nasty ActiveX script bugs that cause browsers to lock up and systems to reboot. I ran a virus scan and saw nothing. I ran multiple products, and my system was clean. I even ran some rather esoteric root kit scanners, and still found nothing! Figuring there was a RAM problem, I then ran Memtst86 for memory errors. After running for over 7 passes, overnight, nothing was found. From what I've read, and experienced, if the test passes for at least 7 cycles, then it's a pretty good chance that the RAM is good.
Sunday, I was in Outlook, and the system locked. The boot drive started chattering, buzzing and clicking, and then the system rebooted. I scheduled a chkdsk /R (Repair), and the system ran until it froze at stage 4/5 at around 72%. It then rebooted and did the chkdsk all over again and locked up at the same place. Hmm.... bad drive. I replaced the older hard drive with a new one. I initially thought about an SSD, but I want enterprise-class drives for reliability, but they're way too expensive still! I put in a 2TB Western Digital and everything seemed fine. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and everything was up and running in about three hours. I didn't lose any data because I don't have my data folders on the boot drive. This was a smart move on my part, and saved me quite a bit of rebuilding time because there was no need to copy stuff off the system first. When everything was up and running, I started up Content Manager, and the program froze. I figured that the crashing might have corrupted the assets.tdx file. After the repair, while in the middle of a good session, the program crashed and the system rebooted! This hard drive started clicking and making other weird noises! I ran chkdsk on this drive, and the drive froze. Another bad drive?
I copied my data off, in between now more frequent reboots, and got my stuff to my internal back up drive. I had tried writing to my USB 3.0 external drive, but that was corrupted from a reboot during a copy to that drive, and it no longer showed up in My Computer and showed up as an unknown drive in the Storage Manager. I figured that it was a safe bet to copy stuff off this drive no matter what, and I did as much as I could between reboots until it completed. By Monday afternoon, I had copied my 1.5 TB of data (500 MB of Trainz stuff plus my other data) to my other internal drive. This was a new drive, by the way, so I wasn't concerned about needing to replace it.
The system then rebooted again randomly while reading mail. This sent me on another trip, to my less than favorite electronics store, Best Buy where I picked up a Thermaltake 850W power supply, and an new drive for my data. After replacing the power supply, the system stopped rebooting. The new drives run quietly and very quickly. Some forensic testing on drives showed they had problems. As soon as I powered up the old data drive, it chattered and clicked loudly. When I accessed it through my external drive bay, the system froze. The old boot drive was not much better. This drive was really, really slow as well as very noisy. I suppose the bad power supply may have helped bring them over the edge, but it's hard to tell at this point. The drives had logged close to 10,000 hours on them, according to Crystal Drive Info, and they had been in constant operation for the past 4 years. The power supply was only 4-1/2 years old and comes with a 5 warranty. At this point, I'm not even going to bother to warranty the old power supply. The old unit is quite big compared to the new one, and was a noisier both power and fan noise wise.
What did I get out of this? When building a new system, replace everything. It's not worth trying to salvage any older parts because I ended up wasting a weekend, and probably spent a lot more money from Best Buy than I would have if I had gotten the parts at New Egg.
John
When I built my new PC a few months ago, I carried over my case, with the power supply, and hard disks which I was using before. Perhaps I should have spent the extra dough up front and got new drives and a power supply, but why would I have to? They all seemed to be working well at the time, and had never given me a problem before. Anyway, the system kept crashing while in Trainz. I initially thought it was bad video drivers, DirectX versus Open/GL, etc., I updated to the latest ones for NVidia, which didn't help so I reinstalled Trainz, and everything ran fine afterwards. Then last Friday, while in the middle of editing a session, my system rebooted! Huh? What!? I checked the Event Viewer and saw nothing. There was no mention of what happen, which means that the OS didn't have a chance to write anything to the event log. This is not a good thing because it makes finding the problem more difficult. It seems that when problems strike, I get the nasty ones.
After that reboot, I then went back into Trainz and everything was fine for the rest of the day. Saturday was fine until later in the evening when the system rebooted again on me while on the web. At this point, I thought there was a script virus. Those nasty ActiveX script bugs that cause browsers to lock up and systems to reboot. I ran a virus scan and saw nothing. I ran multiple products, and my system was clean. I even ran some rather esoteric root kit scanners, and still found nothing! Figuring there was a RAM problem, I then ran Memtst86 for memory errors. After running for over 7 passes, overnight, nothing was found. From what I've read, and experienced, if the test passes for at least 7 cycles, then it's a pretty good chance that the RAM is good.
Sunday, I was in Outlook, and the system locked. The boot drive started chattering, buzzing and clicking, and then the system rebooted. I scheduled a chkdsk /R (Repair), and the system ran until it froze at stage 4/5 at around 72%. It then rebooted and did the chkdsk all over again and locked up at the same place. Hmm.... bad drive. I replaced the older hard drive with a new one. I initially thought about an SSD, but I want enterprise-class drives for reliability, but they're way too expensive still! I put in a 2TB Western Digital and everything seemed fine. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and everything was up and running in about three hours. I didn't lose any data because I don't have my data folders on the boot drive. This was a smart move on my part, and saved me quite a bit of rebuilding time because there was no need to copy stuff off the system first. When everything was up and running, I started up Content Manager, and the program froze. I figured that the crashing might have corrupted the assets.tdx file. After the repair, while in the middle of a good session, the program crashed and the system rebooted! This hard drive started clicking and making other weird noises! I ran chkdsk on this drive, and the drive froze. Another bad drive?
I copied my data off, in between now more frequent reboots, and got my stuff to my internal back up drive. I had tried writing to my USB 3.0 external drive, but that was corrupted from a reboot during a copy to that drive, and it no longer showed up in My Computer and showed up as an unknown drive in the Storage Manager. I figured that it was a safe bet to copy stuff off this drive no matter what, and I did as much as I could between reboots until it completed. By Monday afternoon, I had copied my 1.5 TB of data (500 MB of Trainz stuff plus my other data) to my other internal drive. This was a new drive, by the way, so I wasn't concerned about needing to replace it.
The system then rebooted again randomly while reading mail. This sent me on another trip, to my less than favorite electronics store, Best Buy where I picked up a Thermaltake 850W power supply, and an new drive for my data. After replacing the power supply, the system stopped rebooting. The new drives run quietly and very quickly. Some forensic testing on drives showed they had problems. As soon as I powered up the old data drive, it chattered and clicked loudly. When I accessed it through my external drive bay, the system froze. The old boot drive was not much better. This drive was really, really slow as well as very noisy. I suppose the bad power supply may have helped bring them over the edge, but it's hard to tell at this point. The drives had logged close to 10,000 hours on them, according to Crystal Drive Info, and they had been in constant operation for the past 4 years. The power supply was only 4-1/2 years old and comes with a 5 warranty. At this point, I'm not even going to bother to warranty the old power supply. The old unit is quite big compared to the new one, and was a noisier both power and fan noise wise.
What did I get out of this? When building a new system, replace everything. It's not worth trying to salvage any older parts because I ended up wasting a weekend, and probably spent a lot more money from Best Buy than I would have if I had gotten the parts at New Egg.
John