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Spontaneous, repeated reboots with occasional BSOD
I have been trying to see if somebody else has already posted a problem like mine but my system won't stay up long enough for me to get to the end of reading posts. And that's the problem. My system keeps spontaneously rebooting. Here is what I have tried, based on things I have managed to read between reboots.
I got MEMTEST86 and let it run for about 7 hours. No errors.
I tried to localize the problem to a USB port. This system has 8 USB ports total. There's 2 USB ports on the front of the machine, which I have used every so often when I am loading new music onto my iPod. But usually these ports are not in use. The last time I did use them was several months ago. The back of the machine has 2 banks of USB ports, one bank of 4 ports and one bank of 2 ports. Normally, my USB keyboard is plugged into a slot in the bank-of-4. But in my attempt to determine whether the USB ports are the problem, I went into the BIOS and disabled both banks I was not using. Thus if I was using a port in the bank-of-4 but a port in the bank-of-2 was throwing errors, I eliminated that possibility by disabling the bank-of-2 in the BIOS. Similarly, when I had the keyboard plugged into the bank-of-2 in the back of the machine, I had the bank-of-4 disabled in the BIOS. The cable for the keyboard won't reach to the front of the machine, so I've had that bank disabled for all of this. In any case, I continued to get reboots no matter where I plugged in my keyboard. I conclude that this eliminates the USB ports as a source of the problem. Unless they're ALL bad. I hate to believe that's true. And if the problem is in the USB ports, it's intermittent since, like I say, my keyboard is USB and . . . well . . . the evidence is in front of your eyes that it must be working most of the time.
Some more detail on my symptoms. This just started happening about a week ago. Normally, I hibernate my system when I'm done with it for the day. Last Thursday (or about then) when I fired it up after hibernating it the night before, I got a BSOD. Since then, it's been hell. Of course, I haven't even thought about doing a hibernate since then. I'm doing perfectly innocuous things & poof, the system spontaneously reboots. I've even left the system idle while I was in another room doing . . . whatever. I come back to discover it's rebooted. Most often when this happens, the reboot presents me with a list of choices of how to reboot, with "Restart Normally" as the recommended choice. I do that & it reboots to the normal system like nothing happened. About once a day, it reboots to a slightly different screen that tells me "Startup Repair" is the recommended choice. So I do that. It runs for about half an hour. I sometimes tell it to go to a restore point, sometimes I don't. It doesn't seem to make much difference. The resulting report that it offers shows return codes 0 on everything it tried & doesn't appear to have found anything that needed repairing.
Question about restore points. If I did happen to manage to go back to some earlier restore point, would Windows Update just offer me the missing updates next time?
Occasionally, maybe one time in 5, the spontaneous reboot goes instead to a BSOD. Maybe one time in 10 of the BSODs, its alleged writing of a dump to my disk completes & then it proceeds through a normal reboot. But most often it doesn't seem to complete the dump. I wait a couple of minutes, verify that the disk activity light is not on, not flickering, and I power off. When I power on, it does a normal bootup. I'm a bit surprised I haven't even once seen it do a CHKDSK.
Every so often, the reboot is on the verge of showing the desktop and it packs it in & immediately does another normal reboot. When it does complete a reboot, I have gotten anything from 2 minutes to 2 hours of up time. There's no pattern of my activity that I have discerned that reliably makes it stay up or reboot. I'll have a couple of Firefox windows open with multiple tabs in each & it will reboot. After reboot, Firefox does let me resume with the same windows & tabs so it doesn't seem like there's something on those web pages that causes the problem. I will say that sometimes, opening 15 or 20 tabs in a browser window seems to cause a reboot. But even that is intermittent. After a reboot, the system has stayed up long enough for me to read whatever I'm going to on the 20 tabs and then I manage to get to a normal shutdown of Firefox. And inevitably, some time later, it's reboot city all over again.
On my to-do list are:
1 - run a complete antivirus scan
2 - run a complete Malwarebytes scan
3 - run a complete Spybot scan
4 - run SFC /VERIFYONLY
I have a customized Start Orb & I don't want to have to redo it. In the past, when I have run SFC, the only error it finds is on explore.exe, and that's because of my Start Orb so it's not really an error. I have already tried running SFC but the system hasn't yet stayed up long enough for that to complete. It seems that if I try to run it in background, since it takes a while to complete, that the system is more likely to reboot. But I am so jittery from all of this that I could be hallucinating that correlation.
5 - run CHKDSK on my boot partition
I can only hope the system stays up long enough to run these scans.
Already did registry cleanups via Eusing Free Registry Cleaner as well as CCleaner.
So how did I manage to get such a long post onto the forum? I composed it in a text file outside the browser and hit SAVE every few seconds. This allowed me to complete it without too much retyping due to the reboots that did interrupt me. Then once I was ready, I came here & just cut/pasted the text into this post. I have attached the results of DM Log Collector to this post. You'll notice there's no dump. Not exactly sure why not. Do they get erased each time? I have had a few BSODs that did claim to have completed writing a dump so I don't know why one of those didn't get included.
So now I throw myself on the mercy of you kind folks gathered here & hope we can somehow restore this system to the normal operation I have enjoyed for the past couple of years. Is the problem in hardware? Is it in software? I can't tell.
And oh yeah. Huge thanks ahead of time.