Frick!!!

[Beerknurd]

I awoke this morning to find my AMD 4200+ had turned off... It was not warm at all so it had probably been down for a while. At first I thought maybe my son had turned off my computer. "He likes the big glowing power button". I powered it up and before it could even get to the Windows logo... It shuts down again. No warning, no beeps, not even a BSOD...

I have never had a computer go out on me... I guess I should consider myself lucky.

Not sure what would cause it to shut down like that... Is it hard drive failure?

I want to get some advice before I go buy a new hard drive. Any ideas?

[Beerknurd]

I finally got it to boot into safe mode. I disabled all startup processes, restarted and then it started up fine. So not sure what caused this.

Next stop:

Full virus scan

[vaughan]

Is it overheating? Maybe cpu fan clogged with dust or a cable/wire getting in the way? Check temps in the BIOS.

[Beerknurd]

It has been back up and running at full power for almost 9 hours now... Temp is fine.

Ran a full virus scan and nothing came up. Blew all the dust bunnies out of there too.

When you only have 3 computers, having one go down is scary... Money is tight and who knows when I could have got it back up and running again. If it does end up crapping out on me, it is definitely gonna get a makeover when I can afford it. At least 4 cores...

[NeoGen]

That was scary... that computer must be playing a halloween trick on you! lol

But seriously now, a coumputer shutting down on its own with no warning or errors, especially during bootup process, usually is the temperature sensor safety mechanism, when it reaches to a certain high temp it will just shut down to prevent damage or the risk of fire. And usually what makes temps go too high is when the fans are clogged and dont circulate the air properly, like vaughan said.

Apart from that the only other explanation I can think of is maybe an electrical problem... maybe you have a flaky PSU, or the power strip where all the devices are hooked up is failing? If there is a power failure, no matter how short it is, computer usually shuts down and does not restart on its own. (There is an option to turn on automatically when power comes back on but it is usually turned off on the BIOS)

[Beerknurd]

When I tried to boot it up after the initial issue, it was completely cool. It had been turned off for a long time. Sill not sure what the problem is/was. I am just gonna classify it as an Unsolved Mystery.

A few hours shy of 24 hours and it is happily chugging away... :shrugs:

[Ototero]

Take a look in the Administrator system logs, there might be a hint.