XP automatically shutting Down

[Murray720]

This is PIII / 500mhz / 256mb RAM machine that duel boots with Win98 and XP pro. It's been like that for over a year with no problem.

symptoms:
-Win98 is fine but when booting to XP the computer will automatically shutdown (similar to hard boot).
-Shutdown time varies ... sometimes 2 minutes, sometimes 20 minutes
-No Roll-Back date available

In the past i've traced auto shutdowns to memory issues but because this machine has been running like this for over a year and Win98 is fine, i can't see that being the problem. I'm thinking more along the lines of a process that is triggering the shut down... maybe spyware / virus related.

This PC is also running Norton Antivirus and System Works.

what i've tried:
1)Ad-Aware (spyware scan). -- PC shutdown before finishing

2)Norton Disk DR. -- PC now will not even boot to to XP, it just sits on a black screen.

**i should also mention this machine is at a remote location and all my trouble shooting has been over the phone.

Any Suggestions?

 

[Dreamland]

Some random thoughts FWIW, Murray720. I'm leaning more and more towards a generalized issue with 2K/XP and disk I/O:

Win2K and especially XP are much more disk intensive than 98 and become worse over time (restore points, fragmentation, swap file, etc.) - I'm seeing this result in more thermal instability problems with the drives or IDE controller chips than I've ever seen. Difficult to remotely diagnose, unfortunately. Once the drive gets to this state, defragging or disk cleanup-type utilities are nearly impossible to run.

Not entirely unrelated is 2K/XP's maniacal intolerance to any disk I/O problems. Ever see a "Error reading Drive C:" message in XP? It seems to likes to take the initiative and just reboot itself without warning or freeze when this happens. Again, difficult to diagnose remotely. This is especially problematic if XP encounters any kind of error when updating either the MFT table (if you're using NTFS), the secondary MFT or the swap file. Mark an exising sector bad in one of these objects and XP becomes catatonic or just keeps rebooting.

Wiping a drive and reloading often fixes both of the above conditions for some time, but in many cases they start up again in a few weeks or months. Replacing the drive isn't the solution either - I'm seeing most of these weird mystery reboots on new drives a month or two old. May just be coincidental because new machine = XP = new drive, but no way to tell.

Weak power supplies may be part of the problem as well. No problems when running 98, but 2K/XP get cranky in systems with weak or electrically noisy supplies. Possibly affects the number of errors XP encounters during disk operations resulting in the mystery shutdowns discussed above. Could also be that the intensive use of the drive by XP results in less PSU stability. Again, no way to test but you would be suprised how stable XP can suddenly become when you force the system drive down to ATA-33 and disconnect every other IDE device. Never had this problem with the earlier Windows versions, or with Linux today.

Short of replacing everything with newer/better/more expensive in an attempt to make XP stable, there's not much software- or configuration-wise that I see great success with. The cheapest (and unfortunately the most labor-intensive) that I'm having a little luck with is to use many small partitions on a disk with relatively large cluster sizes when running 2K or XP.

By pushing everything possible off to a different partition, you can squeeze the XP system files (including a healthy number of restore points) into less than 700MB. Making that system partition 2GB means a relatively small MFT table to manage and plenty of disk slack. The swap file gets it's own little partition, programs and archives spread across several others.

The 'apparent' stability goes well beyond what my wishful thinking would suggest. My tentative observation is that 2K/XP are not especially stable on large, single partitions (on some machines) whether using FAT32 or NTFS and the instability becomes more pronounced over time. Using more/smaller partitions of fewer files *seems* to result in a more stable machine *if* the machine is known stable on 95/98/ME/NT4/Linux. I can think of many reasons why this should and should not matter, but it's the only effective Poor Man's XP stabilizing trick I have up my sleeve. YMMV, of course.

 

[linney]

To get further information about the error look in the Event viewer.

Look in the System or Application folder. You can get to the Event Viewer via right click My Computer icon and select Manage.

Any errors logged in the Event Viewer can be expanded by double clicking on the error line.

Take any error I.D. number and search for it on this site.

http://www.eventid.net/events.asp

Also check any "Information" line that mentions "savedump" and you should find reference to "recovered from a bug check". This is the Stop Error that caused your problem.

If your problem persists post back with this Stop Error.

You can also turn off "automatically restart after an error" so it will just halt at the fault and display the full Stop Error and blue screen.

Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties .
On the Advanced tab, click Settings under Startup and Recovery .
Click to clear the Automatically restart check box under System failure , and then click OK . The error message on a blue screen should remain on the screen so you can record the error information.

 

[Murray720]

thanks for the advise.
i will be working / troubleshooting this machine later today and i'll let you know the result.