All of a sudden last night a computer of mine rebooted for no reason while it was basically just idling. This is a machine that I have had since 2001 and have had basically continually on for the past 3 or 4 years. Basically an appliance, it only had net & power going to it and I would remote desktop into it. The 9 or 10 times it was rebooted was only a restart and it was shut down even less. Running 2k3 server w/ minimal services it was basically a rock, never went down for anything except power outages. So it rebooted and got into an endless reboot cycle. I booted into the 2k3 server recovery console and ran a full chkdsk. After that, it booted into the OS and I logged in, but it froze after about a minute. Rebooted and since then, it only gets to the 2003 splash screen and freezes. Tested the ram via memtest86 and it was fine. Tried bartPE and it freezes when it goes to boot. I even tried bartPE with no IDE devices except the dvd rom attached and it still froze at the part when the XP splash screen should come up. I took a brand new hard drive, swapped everything else out so that it was only that and the dvd rom, and went to install a fresh copy of xp. Install runs fine, I'm able to format the hard drive, but at the first reboot in the installation process, the setup hangs at the point where it says "installing devices". I should mention that I had to replace the power supply in this machine about 2 months ago b/c it died (this was the one that originally came with the machine). The power supply is also 420 watt meant for a P4 so I don't think it is an issue here. I'm thinking maybe the motherboard is just shot? Does that happen to motherboards, that they'll just die in the middle of idling like that? Seems arther strange to me. I've tried everything
this may be a problem with the RAM voltage if it only resets in windows. if there's no problem outside of windows (Dos, POST etc) then you will need to adjust your ram voltages to their correct settings (or Auto) -check your approved voltages from your manufacture and change them accordingly in bios
What are your full computer specs, maybe the new psu is not powerfull enough, you need a good psu thats got decent amps on the 12v rails. So you say its been on nearly all the time for 3 or 4 years?, maybe some hardware has failed, try resetting the bios.
