Anyone know what would cause this?

M

Mr. Saturn

New member
My brother had been using his computer for around 15 minutes when it (at least he thinks it did) froze, then shut down, all within a few seconds. He waited around a half an hour before trying it again, and same result. He dusted it out and placed in a new fan, but now it will only reach safe mode or right before the login screen. He also noticed that prior to the computer shutting down, the keyboard lights flash.

Any ideas?
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That definitely sounds like a virus to me. Try booting with a Linux LiveCD -- if I'm not mistaken, that should tell you whether your problem is on the hard drive or the BIOS.
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I remember the 3 keyboard lights flashing from the bios receiving a reboot request from the software.
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> Any ideas?

virus, definitely. i dunno if you needed a third person saying the same thing or not, but figured i'd do so ;)
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He has now ran a Spybot S&D scan, an Avast! scan, a Windows Defender scan, and an Ad-Aware scan, all of which came up completely negative for anything.

EDIT: In ntbtlog.txt, there are around 20 repeats of this:
Did not load driver Legacy Audio Drivers
Did not load driver Media Control Devices
Did not load driver Legacy Video Capture Devices
Did not load driver Video Codecs
Did not load driver AMD K7 Processor
Did not load driver 56Kbps Internal Modem
Did not load driver Realtek AC'97 Audio for VIA (R) Audio Controller
Did not load driver Communications Port
Did not load driver ECP Printer Port
Did not load driver Parallel Port Joystick Bus
Did not load driver Psx Game Port
Did not load driver Audio Codecs

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> My brother had been using his computer for around 15 minutes
> when it (at least he thinks it did) froze, then shut down,
> all within a few seconds. He waited around a half an hour
> before trying it again, and same result. He dusted it out
> and placed in a new fan, but now it will only reach safe
> mode or right before the login screen. He also noticed that
> prior to the computer shutting down, the keyboard lights
> flash.

> Any ideas?
>

I don't know why everyone is saying it is a virus...the behavior seems too inconsistent to be a virus, as it sometimes reaches the operating system and sometimes it doesn't. I'd go with the power supply. Hook up a new power supply if you have one. I would say that most likely, the power supply is failing, and the reason it can get to safe mode is because safe mode doesn't utilize all of the hardware available, and thus uses less power.

Just to let you know, I'm so sure its the power supply that I'd actually go out and buy another one if I didn't have one to test it with. It's something hardware, because if it wasn't, it would be more consistent, especially in an enviroment like booting the initial parts of an operating system, in which there are very few variables.

Another thing that points to the power supply: He put in a new fan. Does this fan use more power than the last one by chance? That would be why it can't get any farther since he put it in, since even more power on a dying power supply is being used.
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I'm with you on this one. You have to look at what's changed since it's last good boot.But the flashing keyboard lights tell me, like Swamp, that it's more than likely something in the boot sector is blocking the drivers from loading.
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From your second post it seems like your user files may be corrupted. Run the command sfc /scannow *system file checker* at the command prompt to replace all system files to original versions and have your OS cd ready. You may have a corrupted criticle system file.

You also may want to run a thorough scandisk/chkdsk to see if the harddrive has a bad sector/s that is causing this loss of data. <img src=smilies/cwm11.gif>
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