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For the past week, my machine with Windows 7 x64 on it is restarting when I am doing something worth, for eg. writing a program for assignments or playing a game. I am still able to watch movies/videos/surf over the internet continually for n-amount of time(without using my keyboard/mouse), but whenever I am trying to do something(sometimes, replying to certain questions on stackexchange) the screen goes blank for a small amount of time, and in less than 3 seconds, the machine restarts.

I first thought it to be over-heating problem(as the temperature has risen here a lot) so I opened the cabinet and cleaned the whole machine. This has increased the stability to some extent. Now I am able to do the aforementioned tasks for a little longer, but even now, I can hear the particular beep sound which hard disk makes when its buffer is lost or the connection interrupted. And then the system restarts.

My only other thought is that the keyboard is having some problem(as I am able to do anything not involving key presses), so I got a different keyboard from a friend of mine. The problem is still there. :(

Any help/comment regarding this problem will be appreciated. I bought ZX 650W power supply quite recently(2/3 months ago) and my graphics card is nVIDIA 9600 GS(which gains a temperature of nearly 52 deg. Celsius while booting)

EDIT

On running a D7 stress test on machine, and checking the system logs, I found this: D7 System Error Log

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  • Did you try an offline / online Windows stress test?
    – JohannesM
    Apr 3, 2012 at 14:04
  • Are the case/cpu fans working? Is the cpu heatsink attached properly?
    – Moab
    Apr 3, 2012 at 14:41
  • Let Memtest86 run for over a dozen passes on the system.
    – Aki
    Apr 3, 2012 at 14:48
  • @Moab yes, all the fans are working fine. They had some dust accumulated in them, which I cleaned as mentioned: I opened the cabinet and cleaned the whole machine
    – hjpotter92
    Apr 3, 2012 at 14:55
  • cleaning does not mean you checked the fans are working or the heatsink is attached properly, which entails removing heatsink and clean and re-apply quality heatsink compound.
    – Moab
    Apr 3, 2012 at 15:00

1 Answer 1

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Since you are getting actual errors on your hard drive focus on that. The utility SpinWrite from 'grc.com' is superb at recovering data from failing sectors and at remapping around them.

Many things can cause this such as if the drive has a loose data cable in the machine or if the electronics in either the drive controller or the drive itself were damaged by a voltage spike such as from lightning storm very nearby or if the drive itself jolted physically causing a read head physical crash on the media inside or if the drive is overheating by far the electronics will malfunction.

It sounds like when a specific place or places on the hard drive is accessed it triggers.

Making a backup copy of any data you want to keep from that hard drive is urgent.

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  • Did you mean SpinRite 6.0? I have downloaded it. And I can't see any options to do a remapping/checking HDD for failed sectors. <i.imgur.com/UT4pD.jpg>
    – hjpotter92
    Apr 3, 2012 at 18:55
  • Thanks. :) That helped a lot. I didn't use SpinRite. Just used the good old chkdsk :)
    – hjpotter92
    Apr 4, 2012 at 7:43

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