Random restarts (W2K)

[killermink]

I have just installed a new 40gb hard drive and proceded to install Windows 2k on it. I booted to the CD and followed the prompts as you usually would. This whole process was fine, until at the end it asked me to restart and when it did, I was logged in for about 2 secs before the machine turned off and rebooted. This now happens continually, sometimes during the BIOS screens and soemttimes after Win200 has started. I cannot understand why I could do the whole of the setup without a problem (suggesting not a hardware issue), but now I cant even get the machine to boot fully. As the reboot appears completley random, and often ooccurs before Win20000 has even begun to load I am not sure what to do next. I was going to roll-back to Win98, but I cannot even get the machine to boot to a floppy without it restarting. Any ideas?

[Andy-S]

This is a curious problem. You say that the restarts occur even when trying to boot from a floppy. What I would do is disconnect the HDD to see if the restarts still occur. While you are doing that check that you didn't accidentally unseat anything when installing the new HDD.

Cheers
Andy

[killermink]

I have triple checked all the connections at least three times (!), and nothing was touched between completing the install of win 2000 and rebooting for the first time, so I don't think it is that. I don't have a second hard drive available to try, so if I disconnect the new one, will I still be able to boot to floppy? (assuming everything else is fine)

Killermink

[Andy-S]

If you disconnect the hard drive you will still be able to boot to the floppy. This will at least help pin it down to being related to the HDD or W2K.

Cheers
Andy

[killermink]

I haven't been at the computer (and won't be) today to disconnect the HDD and boot to floppy, but had a thought (NEWBIE ALERT!) that I may have plugged the wrong connector on the IDE cable to the harddrive.... should it be the one at the end of the cable or the one in the middle? i.e. have I accidently plugged it in as a slave and would this cause the restarts? (the jumpers on the HDD ARE positioned as master). I'm sure I used the same one that was connected to the replaced (first) harddrive, but...

killermink

[Andy-S]

There are so many different configurations of drives and cables nowadays but the most common from the main PC manufacturers is cable select. I'm not sure that this would cause the kind of problems you are seeing as your problem is also evident during POST but you could try changing the jumper to cable select (CS) or try the other connector without any jumper changes. I have seen weirder things happen so they are both worth a try.

Cheers
Andy