PCTech Forums

I'm helping a friend with his PC problem and recently have come into one I can't solve. He has recently installed a new 200 GB hard drive in his sytem, and all was well until just now. The system will shut itself off at random times with no warning and hard drive activity light flashes red, instead of the standard green.
The system is a Compaq Presario 6020US, and all components seems to be working fine. If you need anything else to help let me know. Thanks all in advance!

Hello Wildthing61476

How long did the new hard drive work before it started shutting down at random?

Most of the time when a machine has sporadic behavior, self-rebooting is a sign of a bad power supply. Or it could be over-heating issues.

Might be something you could check. Blow out your case with canned air. And check your fans.

hey Wildthing61476

if the hard drive works with in a few weeks or buying it, it shoudlnt really go rong. not on its own any way. so maby your friend has got a falty bit of hardware?

Venney

Good point Daninku, Ram has a funny way of cloaking itself making you think something else is at fault. I definately wouldn't rule it out.

Well originally, in addition to the new hardrive, I added a new RAM moudle, which then caused windows to "miss" certain .sys files at startup. After swapping the old RAM back in the system, the problems happened again.

This could be a heat problem, a ram problem or a power supply.

Let’s see if we can find out what the error code is when this happens.
Go to Start > Control panel > System > Advanced tab
Under the “Startup and Recovery” section click the “Settings” button
In the “System Failure” section put a check in the box next to “Write an event to the system log”
And uncheck the “Automatically Restart” box.

Now when your system crashes you will get a BSOD (blue screen of death),
before you restart, write down the error description and
error codes from this blue screen and post them back here.

If Windows would start up of course that would be good, but I had to reinstall it, and it won't let me finish...it stops at various %'s of installation, not a set %. It's not a reboot either, as I said before it shutsdowns, and won't let me turn it back on for a while.