[SOLVED] Can a failing D drive cause random restarts?

kujen

Distinguished
Dec 31, 2007
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I get random restarts - the PC shuts down and restarts itself as if the power went out. Sometimes it goes weeks between restarts - today it's happened three times. I have the system on a UPS. I really don't think it is my PSU, because I got that replaced with a new one under RMA and I am still getting the restarts.

I do have a D drive that is racking up reallocated sectors, currently over 1600. Hard Disk Sentinel also says 86 errors occurred during data transfer and 1 weak sector.

Today the PC restarted itself right as a file was starting to download to this drive, and another time when I was opening Firefox. Can the failing D drive be the issue here? I'd have thought a failing HDD would show signs like freezing or Windows not seeing it, but could it cause my whole system to crash without a blue screen? Nothing in the event viewer seems to be pointing to the issue, it just gives me event ID 41(63). I've run memtest successfully so it shouldn't be the RAM. How do I find out if it's something else like the motherboard?

CPU: Intel 4770K
Motherboard: Asus Z87 Pro
Graphics: Gigabyte 1070 Ti
RAM: Kingston HyperX 16GB 1600
PSU: Corsair HX750i
System is not overclocked
 
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Solution
If the D drive was present when windows was installed, there will be a hidden recovery partition that is accessed at boot time. If that is flaky you might not be able to boot.

If the hardware is easily accessible, just disconnect the sata power or data cable from the hdd and see if it boots.

RealBeast

Titan
Moderator
It is one possibility that is easy enough to check by going into the bios and disabling the SATA port that the defective drive is on. If it no longer restarts then that was the problem.

Post if it continues after that and we'll move on from there.
 
If the D drive was present when windows was installed, there will be a hidden recovery partition that is accessed at boot time. If that is flaky you might not be able to boot.

If the hardware is easily accessible, just disconnect the sata power or data cable from the hdd and see if it boots.
 
Solution