PC freezes after 10 min of diagnostics

Hi,

I have a PC which freezes after 10 min. of diagnostics. Quits during MemTest, Spinrite scan etc. Reseated memory. Tried different controllers for hard drives. Tried different hard drives. Can't get a scan to run long enough to determine problem. Any suggestions as to where to look?

Thanks,

luciano

 

Mind telling us what hardware failed?

Please state your entire system specs. Incl Power supply please.

And what the stock and what speed you currently have things at.

 

Thanks for the reply. I'll do the best I can. This is a home made beast given to me by a friend. We have an Intel Celeron D 3.2GHZ, 1.5GB DDR RAM, 60GB Seagate IDE Hard Drive, 550W Power Up power supply running Windows XP with some lame Vista skin on it when I get it booted into Windows. At present we have a VGA monitor attached and PS2 mouse and keyboard. Not really thinking it's overclocked.

It's hard to tell what hardware is failing. I've tried reseating the RAM, changing out the hard drive. It seems to like to sit a while after being powered down. Otherwise boot freezes at Verifiying DMI Pool data. Right now it froze while I was checking BIOS settings. It froze about 10 minutes into a spinrite scan. Same with MemTest. The longer I let it sit the longer it goes before freezing. By freezing I mean I have no keyboard and all processes stop. This is way before I get to Windows.

I have one funny thing about this hard drive. No matter how it's jumpered or cabled it always shows up as a slave. The other drive I tried showed up properly as master which is how it was jumpered. But with that drive hooked up it froze even faster with Spinrite. I even tried doing a MemTest scan without a hard drive hooked up. The other IDE controller has two DVD's hooked to it. There is a floppy drive.

Thanks.

luciano:confused

 

With the case open (side removed) I observed the CPU fan was operating and the case fan in the back was operating. I entered the BIOS and navigated to the PC Health section. I watched the CPU temp slowly rise from about 57C to 114C at which point I was no longer able to use the keyboard to navigate through the BIOS menus. I assume this would happen even more rapidly when I am running a disc scan of some kind. So I am going to conclude that CPU cooling is not working for whatever reason and the CPU overheating is the cause of the crashing unless someone has a better idea.

All the best,

Mark

 

Gawd man, don't boot into there anymore!:eek Just because your CPU fan seems to be running doesn't mean it's running at its proper speed! Especially since it's an older machine. Change it out and see what happens. Good luck!

BTW, starting at 57C says it already as it should be around 40C or less.

 

WOW!!!

114C!

STOP!

:-D

could be a dodgy temp sensor, but still, there is something seriously wrong here!

Change your HSF, and i suggest you apply some new thermal paste, i recommend arctic silver.