System Restart - possibly caused by Windows Backup and Restore?

I reran sfc (it reported no errors again) and zipped up the whole thing here. Interestingly, I had another crash when it reached 80% or so and had to restart - you can see the timestamp jump from 2011-02-13 13:40:38 to 2011-02-13 13:43:45.

Stop the presses, I might have found something. Will update when I know for certain if this actually fixes the problem, but I think my CPU may be overheating.

Nope, that wasn't it.

I noticed that the CPU fan was only loosely held in place, two of the connection points had come loose. I unhooked it, removed the compound with isopropyl, reapplied new compound, securely fastened the whole thing.

Then I had it go to BIOS only and ran the native BIOS hardware monitor, the CPU had a stable temp of 119F for half an hour. Shut it down and let it cool for a few minutes, then started Windows and started Backup and Restore. It promptly crashed as before. I should mention that I installed CPUID hardware monitor before all this happened and I had it running during this test, it found nothing to indicate CPU overheating.

Damn, this is frutstrating.

Hello!

I don't see much in your CBS log. Your first SFC stopped around the 75% mark, and then we get a computer startup, but no error. The next SFC completed with no corruptions detected. Does this sound correct? I could have missed something. Tell me if you think I have. No other obvious errors either. I don't know what to say really.

Richard

Yep, that sums it up pretty well, unfortunately. That's what is so frustrating about this, it simply dies and nothing gets logged. I would think that's a dead ringer for a hardware problem except that I can reliably make it happen whenever I want to, and of course if I just wait not very long it'll happen anyway.

I have a spare HD, am thinking about just installing Windows on it to see if that will do the trick. If so I'll just reinstall all my software and move on - a hassle but if it works, so be it. If it doesn't work then at least I'll know it's hardware-related.

Unless you can think of anything better to try?

PROBLEM SOLVED!!!

I think so, anyway. And yes, it was the HD.

I reinstalled Windows on a spare HD and had no problems doing restore points or backups. Rather than reinstall everything from scratch, I decided to ghost my system drive to a new one first. Because I couldn't run Backup and Restore without crashing, I went to the Western Digital website where they have Acronis True Image available for free download. My drive was a WD drive so I had no problem getting this done.

While ghosting the drive, the software encountered a bad region of the disk that was not repairable, but it completed the image anyway. I then booted on the new drive and have done both a system restore and a backup and restore without any problems.

Thanks for the assistance with this, even though it turned out not to be a Windows problem I learned a good bit about the tools available for the next time.