Hello Random Shutdowns!

[Kasmira]

NEW built comp. Random Shutdowns. Help?

Built my own computer, bought it piece by piece. Put it together last night. Don't know what may be relevant, so I'll just give the whole breakdown.

MB: K8T Neo2 (K8T800Pro)
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3500+
RAM: 4x 512 Corsair TWINx DDR
GPU: e-GeForce FX 5500 256MB
HDD: WD Caviar 80GB Sata
OS: 2003 Server
eh?: Has DVD drive and CD burner drives.

Power supply cord is 24pin, mobo is 20pin. Bought the converter for that, so that is how it is hooked up. Power supply is 450W.

Started it up and bios would not recognize all the ram or hard drive. Flashed bios and fixed the ram problem, put a jumper on the HD and fixed that. Installed what I needed, save for the drivers for the CD burner. No random shut downs.

Brought it over and hooked it up at my boyfriends house, and hooked up a 120GB SeaGate external harddrive. It randomly shuts down. Randomly... it doesn't only happen when I'm doing some certain thing.

My boyfriend, and my roommates all work or worked in tech support, and also built their own computers. I've gotten a lot of different possibilites from them, and was hoping someone could narrow it down, and offer advice on how I could narrow it down. (Though I can't do anything to it right this moment because it is at my bfs house.)

They have said it could be a low/dead bios battery. That it could be the fact of the converter on the power supply. That it could be cooling (which my boyfriend is checking out tonight). Someone told me it could be drivers...

Does anyone have any opinions, information, or advice that could help me on this? That machine is my baby, and right now it's like it's sick. I want it cuuuuured!

 

[ReturnToEmpire]

well does the problem only occur when you use the seagate hard drive?

 

[DCIScouts]

Well first off for future knowledge, if you only have one drive in the computer, it must have a jumper on it set to the "master" position. Otherwise, most computer will just treat it as a slave, and won't really boot off of it very well, if at all.

As for the shutdown issue, did you install drivers for the external Seagate (you didn't say for sure on that hardware...)? And is it the whole computer, or just the drive that dies (I assume it's the computer).

I doubt that it's cooling because the External HDD doesn't really add any heat to the tower, since the drive should have it's own power supply. The low bios battery could cause some problems, but if the compy doesn't shut down when the drive isn't connected, then I don't think that's it either. You might have a faulty converter, but again if it doesn't crash without the drive connected, that shouldn't be it either...

Other options: Is there any software on the drive, that might cause some conflicts with your computer? If the drive is blank or with nothing valuable on it, see if you can format the drive. Also, for the heck of it, check if your drivers and firmware are up to date on your other hardware as well, just in case there might be a conflict there...