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i have a workstation in an industrial environment that reboots twice a day with no visible indication of an issue having occured.

i have done analysis on the programs being used etc at the time but it is random. the event viewer shows nothing, there is no bsod or minidump either. there is no indication after reboot that your system had an issue or it recovered from a serious problem.

looking for a list of best practices for checking stuff out in proper order. we have already done memtest and looked for loose connections and bad power plugs/power bars. everything is pretty stable. is there a tool that can record events as they happen so we can see what was working at the timestamp period when the system rebooted. we know usually when it has rebooted since the event viewer shows certain system resources starting up again.

thanks for any advice and if more clarification is needed i would more than happy to provide.

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  • see me solution @ the bottoms comments section.gd
    – user8256
    Nov 23, 2010 at 13:20

1 Answer 1

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You say this is an industrial environment - is it quite dusty where the PC is?

We have some PCs in our warehouse, and we had something similar happen a while ago with one of them. We went through the exact same steps you have done (test/change plugs, power cables, memtest etc) and these were all fruitless.

In our case, we opened the case up and it was full of fluff and dust that had obviously been building up for a while. We pulled all the fluff out of the box and gave it a good blasting with air in a can and it's been fine since.

All I can imagine is that there was some clump of fluff either shorting something out or breaking a connection, causing the motherboard to instantly power the machine off as a safety mechanism. That would also explain why Windows wasn't logging events, as the motherboard was taking the power out from underneath it.

Edit

Since you say this is only 2 weeks old, I don't imagine it's dust. Have you considered a faulty PSU? That would also explain the lack of blue screens and memory dumps.

If you bought the machine, I would just return it as faulty - they'll probably class it as dead on arrival.

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  • brand new system build about 2 weeks old, not too dusty.
    – user8256
    Nov 20, 2010 at 15:55
  • @dasko - I've updated my answer. Nov 20, 2010 at 16:02
  • power supply will be the first thing to swap out on monday or tuesday depending on whether it has happened over the weekend. i will post back.
    – user8256
    Nov 21, 2010 at 23:54
  • it was a faulty power supply, we replaced with larger and different manuf. and it has been stable since then. these are our own custom built core i7 units that i put the specs together for. we build,test and burn them in through my consulting company. in about 500+ systems in the past 8 years that i have installed i have had only 3 with this type of issue. pretty good % failure rate if you ask me. thanks for the suggestions though. this usually does not happen so it throws me in a loop when you have an issue with any systems i've sold. hope this info helps someone else out.gd
    – user8256
    Nov 23, 2010 at 13:17
  • no problems since power supp replacement.gd
    – user8256
    Nov 25, 2010 at 19:46

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