PC keeps resetring itself...help!

aligator_am

I just got one of the 250GB drives from Aldi and have encountered some problems, first off my board's about 4 years old so it only sees the drive as 130GB... doh! though i suspect that i may be able to fix this by updating the bios (it's a gigabyte board) and now the second, and far more frustrating problem is that the machine keeps resetting itself, i've tried several different OS but to no avail, i thought it may have been the USB devices using up too much juice so i disabled them and it still happens (i think the PSU is only 200 w, not certain though)

I was thinking that it may be a virus as when i was setting up the new drive i went online to download AVG free to protect the machine but i may have unkowningly contracted a boot sector virus, the thing is that when i ran AVG it detected viruses in the windows and system32 directories, but i don't know if they're boot sector or not!

I was thinking of maybe putting my old clean drive in as the primary master and scanning the new drive, that may work...

If anyone has come across anything like this before then it would be much appreciated if you could share your knowledge.

Thanks

Al

Mickie M

the hd space sounds like youre running windows 2000 or 98 which can only do 137gb's (if i remember right), if you have windows xp it should solve that

as for restarting its a commen thing to happen when components arent getting enough power to them, 200w is very weak even if its a quality psu. if the hd is the only thing you upgraded in the 4 years it shouldnt be so much of a problem though.

aligator_am

Yeah I was thinking that, in a couple of weeks I'll be getting a new amd 64 3000+ and board, so I'll have to get a new PSU for that anyway. I've run AVG, Norton and BitDefender across the drive to no avail, there doesn't seem to be anything (virus) on it, if it helps, I just recently added a DVDRW to the machine so that may be a factor too.

Ye see what's kinda odd is, when I use the drive as a storage space (not as the main drive where windows is stored) then it works fine, but for some reason when I have it as the main drive it restarts randomly, if it was a power issue then how would the drive's status affect the amount of power it required? does that make sense?

Cork Skate

aligator_am wrote:

Yeah I was thinking that, in a couple of weeks I'll be getting a new amd 64 3000+ and board, so I'll have to get a new PSU for that anyway. I've run AVG, Norton and BitDefender across the drive to no avail, there doesn't seem to be anything (virus) on it, if it helps, I just recently added a DVDRW to the machine so that may be a factor too.

Ye see what's kinda odd is, when I use the drive as a storage space (not as the main drive where windows is stored) then it works fine, but for some reason when I have it as the main drive it restarts randomly, if it was a power issue then how would the drive's status affect the amount of power it required? does that make sense?

Will you us know how you get on ..... i was thinking of getting one myself, but i would be using it as storage so probably not as bad for me, but might change later on.

Mac daddy

Or else your power supply is not giving enough juice - have a look here you should have a idea what sort of psu you will need.