Win2K Random Reboot Issue

[Tank]

Greetings,

I'm having an issue where several of my fellow employees Win2K computers reboot randomly for no reason. This only appears to be a problem on machines that were originally NT4 and upgraded to Win2K. I'm running Win2K from a fresh install and have never experienced (or even witnessed) this occurence. I'd appreciate any help or advice that anyone could offer. Thanx so much!

-Tank

[Deep Blue]

OK silly question time

1. Are these tweaked or OCed in any way?
(the answer is probably no as they are work machines !)

2. Is there a common task/program that these systems run that yours doesn't?
(Are they SETI crunches or RC5 guys)

3. Are these systems all the same make (deskpros, prolineas etc and is yours different?)

4. Are any of these systems running SP1 yet (i doubt it but I'll ask )

5. What type of work do they do, and business are they in. (Pls provide systems specs so we can help you )

Good luck !

Deep Blue


[This message has been edited by Deep Blue (edited September 13, 2000).]

[Tank]

There are no silly questions, only silly presidential candidates!

1. No, these machines are not tweaked or modified in any way.

2. No, most of the problems seem to be generated in the Finance Department (no surprise there!) so all they really use is the MS Office 2000 Suite. There is nothing at all processor intensive about what they are doing. They could be surfing, working in a spreadsheet, or doing absolutely nothing at all when the reboot occurs. This is of course second hand info as I've never been able to witness it.

3. The machines we currently use are all home built with quality components, e.g. Abit or Asus (MB), Intel (CPU, NIC), Apacer (RAM), Teac or Mitsumi (Floppy), etc. Video cards vary but are usually ATI or an nVidia chipset of some sort.

4. They all have SP1 installed.

5. The work they do (which is minimal as far as I can tell ) is mostly within the MS Office suite and email in the Finance and Purchasing Departments.

I'm quite certain it's not a hardware issue as the machines never had a problem until Win2K was installed over NT4. Of the 90+ computers we have running Win2K, there are only 4 or 5 with this issue. But they all show the same characteristics. One thing I'm going to try (probably today) is upgrading the BIOS of the MB as the latest Abit BIOS claims to fix an overheating issue that may cause instability. Other than that, I have no more ideas.

Thanks for taking the time to help me with this problem!


-Tank

[anounymous]

Ok, here is the thing, I know what gets them rebooting, I don't know how to fix it.

When one of the other machines is rebooted, the others do to, I have the same problem.

[Tank]

>Ok, here is the thing, I know what gets them rebooting, I don't know how to fix it.
When one of the other machines is rebooted, the others do to, I have the same problem.


Are you using DHCP, proxy, or AutoDNS? In your case it sounds as if it were somehow network related. But again, it only does it on a few machines and ONLY on machines that were upgraded from NT4 to Win2K.

-Tank

[anonymous]

There was NT 4 on that machine but it wasn't upgraded to 2000, the disk was formated.

[StormBlade]

I've had that happen to a few systems in my office as well (2 laptops and 1 desktop) and in every case it was hardware related but those were all clean installs of win2k, you may want to check surge protectors to make sure they are working properly since a surge or brownout can cause that to happen, but I would think if you are in a network enviroment the best thing to do would be to back up all the files to a secure network drive and just do a clean install of win2k on the machines in question...MS in the past has not done the greatest job on their upgrade versions of software...since win2k does such an excellent job of finding device drivers for just about any hardware it would prob be faster and easier than trying to repair a bad install

[Tank]

Yea, I've checked power sources, that's not a problem. I agree it would be faster and easier for me to just nuke the box and reinstall. Unfortunately it'll mean that the user will be down for a couple of hours. Our Finance department are major crybabies when it comes to down time. In the end, that may be what I need to try but for now I need to explore options with minimal impact to the user. Thanks for the suggestions.

-Tank

[Jon Q]

You might also want to try this as well. There is an option to reboot Win2K automatically if you blue screen. And I think it's like that by default. Check to see whether or not this option is on (sorry Im not on a Win2k here at work, and I forget where the option is). You might be blue screening and the system is automatically rebooting on its own, and not showing you the Blue Screen O' Death. Try this, and if you are blue screening be sure to grab the information from the screen and check out http://support.microsoft.com. I hope this helps, let us know how it turns out.

Jon Q

[nugie]

Desabling auto reboot option solved my problem.

[nugie]

Stupid double post!

[This message has been edited by nugie (edited September 14, 2000).]

[Tank]

Originally posted by nugie:
Desabling auto reboot option solved my problem.

Was that in the OS or the BIOS? I've gone through the BIOS and disabled anything suspicious. If it exists in the OS, I wasn't able to find it. Where is it located?
Thanks for your time, nugie.

-Tank

[Tank]

Ok, I think I may have found a solution.

One of the people that this has plagued was finally able to get a peep of an error message. The message read, "Page fault in nonpaged area". I recall hearing somewhere that it was an error in Office 2000. So, I've loaded Office 2000 SR-1 and that will hopefully fix the problem. So far the person I've tested it on has not had a lock up. It's been a record 2 days since a crash! I'll keep you guys posted on whether or not this has fixed it. Thanks to everyone that has offered help.

-Tank