Total system lockup

Damn! Clicked on helpful button my mistake - again!


DaveUK said:
Well, i think most people abandoned this thread now lol
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Quite! I lost interest when it became a discussion on the benefits of various different RAM types which is not my forte, I didn't realise that the original problem had reappeared.


DaveUK said:
I think I have found the root cause...this is crazy but, it appears to be my second hard drive.
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Very interesting and well done on finding it. However are you sure it is the hard drive as it could possibly be the IDE cable, just an idea. Also did you have the master drive on the end of the cable and the slave in the middle? If it was the other way around then that may have been the trouble. If that was the case then I would try plugging the drives in as above and see if that makes a difference.

Sorry if this seems all rather unnecessary and feel free to ignore me if you wish but I would be fascinated to find an error like that and would probably spend the next several days playing around with it until I'd found the exact problem.
 
agreed, I would love to get the bottom of this....

I decided to change the IDE cable (as you mentioned) and I made sure that the master was at the top of the cable (I am sure it was before too). On reboot, I entered windows and found that Windows had decided to forget where the drivers for my NIC were. I reinstalled them, and as soon as the reinstalling completed, the pc froze.

I rebooted and all is now fine and working. I'm going to blame the hard drive for the freeze still (since I had only just put the hard drive back in, and this is the first freeze I have had in a couple of days).

However, this has made me start wondering something else. What would happen if my PSU was not powerful enough to power by PC? This is just a thought..I do have 2 x 80gb hard drives, a dvd drive, and a dvd-rw + a geforce fx 5600 ultra graphics card. My PSU is a "Antec SL350PGB 350W ATX P4 Smartpower Dual Fan Power Supply".

Is 350W enough? and if it was not enough....could this be the cause of the freezes? I know this probably sounds like a n00b statement...but perhaps having the 2nd hard drive in too just maxes out the power too much?
 
hmm i don't know - my psu isn't in that list, but Antec PSU's are well respected and known (i've read a few threads with people discussing them).

Is there any way to test to find out if 350W is not enough power? I'm sure the quality of the PSU is fine, but I am worried 350 is too low for my system.
 
Anyone? :)

I have also swopped out the "bad" hard drive for a spare 40gb one I had in another machine...so hopefully this will confirm whether or not the hard drive was the root cause of the problem, or something relating to having a second hard drive in there (ide controller?, psu?, ide cable? etc).

Since swopping out the "bad" hard drive and going down to 1 drive, I haven't frozen at all...so it was certainly causing the freezes somehow!
 
"Basically" a 350W is enough to power mobo,GPU like a GeForce 5600 or something, 2 optical drives, couple of fans and i would imagine two HDD's. Your probably running that PSU to the limit! Id recommend a 450W, thatll do the job nicely.
 
Thanks for the link :) I did their test and it says that I should use a minimum of a 307w PSU. I guess I must be pretty close to maxed out....but I did only just get this PSU :|
 
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