XP pro random shutdown without reboot

[Cornboy69]

Hello all,
I have a 2.4ghz, 512ram, ati9800 128 meg vid card, 120gig serial ata, xp pro rig.
Everything was running fine for the last 5 months, then recently my pc started shutting down for no reason. Sometimes I would be on for an hour, sometimes for 20 seconds after boot.

Now it gives me the dreaded insert system disk upon first boot, then if I do a soft boot it will bring me into xp and shut down at a random interval. I unplugged and replugged everything in just in case it got unseated.
I havent upgraded anything, only software I added was Doom 3 and I have played it for over 2 weeks without a glitch.
I ran antivirus with nothing to report.

Could it be my power supply is going? My hard drive? It just seems so random I cant make sense of it. My fans are all operating correctly and my cpu temp is 45-48c at all times.

One odd thing, my pc does work better if i turn it on its side, but cant load any cds...

Any ideas at all? Many thanks!
John

[Miz]

Given all the symptoms you describe and the statement, "work(s)better if i turn it on its side" indicates to me a hard drive problem. With the case on its side, the access arm doesn't have to fight gravity very much. That could mean the access arm mechanism, which is what reads the data on the drive and swings back and forth across it, is failing. Once it drops down onto the surface of the drive, the end is at hand...and the noise is unmistakable.

I recommend you back up the data you don't want to lose as soon as possible. If it were mine, I wouldn't shut it down until I'd gotten the backup done, either...just in case. I'd be shopping for a new hard drive, too.

[jonno112]

Get into computer management, right click my computer, manage and check the system log this will tell you if there is an issue with your hard drive.

What you described happened to me a couple of weeks ago, i checked the system log and it told me a failure is inevitable.

Backed up all my data then "bang" the drive went, i was lucky.

Hope that helps in some way.

Jonno

[m11007]

Sometimes the act of backing up the data can push a failing hard drive
over the edge. I'd recommend hand-picking files that are *absolutely critical* before you run the bulk backup.