PC suddenly restarts while playing games, one of em is Test Drive Unlimited

I have a messed up Master Boot Record with possible bad sectors. I tried using CHKDSK with the /F and also the /P And /R parameters. Didn't work. Also i tried formatting it twice with the XP installation CD. Also i tried fixing the Master Boot Record by creating a new one with the FIXMBR. Same thing. No luck with that either. After like 20 to 30 minutes while im playing a game the PC shuts down by itself, also it sounds like a HD problem cause they are still spinning. Im guessing a bad sector. Also my scandisk shows i have sector errors also. Ohh and while im not playing a game my PC will get a BSOD. This started to happen just a few days ago so I can't remember what the BSOD exactly said. But from what I can remember it sounded like a HD problem or RAM problem. But then if i had a RAM problem my PC wouldn't boot for crap.

 

Have you try fdisk /mbr

 

Try downloading Hiren's BootCD, and running some of it's hard disk tools.

 

Ok so I DL the Hiren's BootCD and i tried it, looks good with a lot of tools. I'm impressed and congrats to who ever put it together. Anyways, I tried HDD Regenerator and WD Lifeguard Tools, since my main drive is a Western Digital. No luck with both tools, i even did the whole sector scan on it using the HDD Reg. That took a freakin' while. 10+ hrs with a 160GB drive. I have also come to a conclusion that since the tools dont show nothing bad with my drive's (yes i scanned all 4 of my drive's), maybe my PSU is dying out or my VGA card is crapping out. I do i bit of overclocking with it. It could be a PSU problem cause i got a Athlon X2 recently and this hasn't happened b4, only after i got it. I think ill post my specs, it'll give you a overview of how much power i need.

Ok so 4X160 HDD's, two SATA's and 2 IDE's. A Athlon X2 4800+ with a ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe MOBO. A 7900GT VGA Card. Also Im powering up 6 Fans in my case. And one DVD-RW drive. Both my CPU and VGA card are overclocked by about 5 to 10%. Nothing big. Also i have a pair of Patriot Memory sticks rated at 500MHZ, but i only overclock them to 450MHZ, giving my a CPU spped of 2.7 instead of the measly 2.4GHZ. I also cool the memory sticks down with EVERCOOL MNC-E Fans. This is a must have for any overclocker. BTW im not using water cooling, i think it's too much of a hassle. My PSU is a AMS 460 Watt and PCI-E ready with one 6pin rail.

And i forgot to mention one thing, when i had Vista, My System didn't crash when i played games, the games just crashed to the desktop and i'll still be good. When they would crash in my taskbar i would get a message from NVIDIA saying the Display Driver has (done something), cant remember what it said. But it would crash to the desktop and id still be able to restart my game, sometimes it would even crash to the desktop with the game open and itll swith back to the game and ill be able to play.

I don't know what else to include, i guess thats it for now.

 

The description does indeed sound like a ram problem. Sometimes just one or two addresses go bad which causes no noticeable problems with normal use. Then along comes a game which uses it's own memory management and you get odd problems, freezing and bsod though usually an error handler grabs it and returns you to the desktop.
If you were to try installing xp again you would very likely get a crash with a fault in the non-paged area.
Just observations from experience. Try another HDD to be sure, but I think you will find that it is ram. (trying to teach this to our shop gofer)

 

I tried using MemTest to see if something is wrong with my memory, i ran it for like 2 hours, I didn't get any errors.

 

Ok been running MemTest for 10+ hrs and nothing. I'm getting a new 160GB WD HDD from newegg, with the 16MB buffer. I'll tell you if it makes any difference. Also if it's a Ram problem, how do i fix this. And yes, i do get freezing sometimes, even in XP. I even installed XP twice after this started to happen, successfully might i add. No hickups, and's, iff's, but's, a complete installation with no errors.

 

Boot from the windows XP CD, press the "R" key in the setup in order to start the restoration console. Select your windows XP installation from the list, and enter the administrator password.
Enter the command: "FIXMBR" (without the quotes) at the input prompt and confirm the next question with a "Y" (without the quotes). Use exit to restore the computer.

I had to use this on a PC that I had corrupted the MBR with by using a boot manager.

Worked perfectly. This may have been posted before, and if so, forgive me. If not, now you know how to repair your MBR. By the way MBR stands for Master Boot Record. THis procedure kind of replaced Fdisk I think.


or use a windows 98 start uo disk and enter fdisk
next

The simplest way to repair or re-create MBR is to run Microsoft's standard utility called FDISK with a parameter /MBR, like

A:\> FDISK.EXE /MBR


FDISK is a standard utility included in MS-DOS, Windows 95, 98, ME.

If you have Windows NT / 2000 / XP, you can boot from startup floppy disks or CD-ROM, choose repair option during setup, and run Recovery Console. When you are logged on, you can run FIXMBR command to fix MBR.

Also you can use third party MBR recovery software or if you've created MBR backup, restore it from there (Active@ Partition Recovery has such capabilities).

What will happen if the first sector is bad/unreadable?

Most likely we'll get the same black screen, which we got when trying to boot. When you try to read it using Disk Viewer/Editor you should get an error message saying that sector is unreadable. In this case recovery software is unable to help you to bring HDD back to the working condition, i.e. physical partition recovery is not possible. The only thing that can be done is to scan and search for partitions (i.e. perform virtual partition recovery), and in case if something is found - display them and give the user an opportunity to save important data to another location. Third party software, like Active@ UNERASER, will help you here.

 

Hey, ireland, sorry to burst your bubble, but I'm already familiar with XP's recovery Console and all the other stuff you wrote. Sorry for being a smarta**. Ireland, please can you read my other posts in this thread and tell me what you think, cause i already did fix my MBR twice, even formatted the damn disk twice, and i still get no errors.

 

Ok so my new HDD came in. Some of you guys were right, it wasn't my HDD problem. Now I'm thinking its my RAM problem like you said. Now how do i fix this, I still have time to send my RAM back if you think its faulty. Also i did the MEM Test on em, and i get no errors. Supreme Commander even works on it. So does Infernal. Test Drive Unlimited is one of the very few that locks my computer. I also read that Yasu may be locking up my computer as it did on some other people's machines. But I don't use YASU. HEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEELP.

 

Here is another game that makes my PC restart, Stalker. This is something very strange and it's beginning to pi** me off!. Scratch that, it has already gotten me furious! Anyways should i RMA my ram or not.

 

Hey guys, Im new to YASU (i think its an emulator) and its wonders. I recently came across a game and its instructinos were to mount w/ daeomn tools, install the game, and then use YASU in addition to use the game. However im not sure how to use this tool but anyway, I double click, and it tells me about resetting drives D and H. I look under task manager and i see YASU.exe running. However when i open the game it says, unable to open because d3dx9_30.dll. At the top of the error message it says game.exe-unable to locate componet. SAo im wondering, is this a problem w/ installing the game or am i not using YASU correctly. Please, I really have no idea how to use YASu, perhaps someome could give me a tutorial??? thanks all.

 

could this be caused by a bad driver, possibly a IDE or Display driver, or some other driver that's buggy,

 

Hey guys Since i started this thread im gonna finish it. I found what made my PC reboot suddenly while playing certain games. This also goes for Vista. At some point NVIDIA decided to slack off and wrote poor drivers for their Motherboards and their VGA's. I decided to try older versions of certain drivers, mainly i uninstalled the NFORCE drivers and the graphic card drivers. I went and installed 91.47 drivers for my VGA card, and Test Drive Unlimited was running fine for more than 4 hours, and with these drivers the game seemed to perform better. I also reverted to my old NFORCE drivers, version 6.6.5 which i found at ASUS.

 

Ok so, guess what. Im getting problems again. Yes the same kind i had before. Even with older drivers. Is it possible my graphic card's 3D engine is dying or possible burned out. If im not mistaken there are two kinds of engines on a VGA card, a 2D and a 3D, this could explain why my system still boots into windows and never reboots until i start playing a game.

 

Return all your settings to factory defaults. No overclocking.

Test your games, or benchmarks accordingly. Open the side of your case...what you'll be wanting to do is see if the video card's temperature threshold is being exceeded. Could also be your CPU.

Just because hardware can overclock, doesn't mean it's stable doing it...even just barely above specs.

 

Yeah restoring the RAM and VGA card helped. Now i don't get screen corruptions while playing games and it doesn't shut down. So is this like a Ram problem or a VGA problem. My RAM is rated at DDR500, but i only clock my RAM at 450.