Legit Reviews

So, you do Start -> Shutdown -> OK and it's supposed to turn off the system.

Well, with my friends computer, it turns off the hard drives and sits on the "Shutting Down Windows" screen with the rest of the system on.

Any ideas as to why this would happen? It worked perfectly fine the first month after I built it, then it gradually did it more and more. Now it does it all the time. It still does it after a reformat and in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows. I also replaced the CMOS battery since his CMOS was occasionally losing stored information.

Windows XP x64
AMD A64 4400+ x2
ASUS A8R32-MVP Deluxe
1x 74GB Raptor
1x 250GB SATA
1x 200GB IDE
1x ATi Radeon 1900XT (Used to be crossfire but he fried the main crossfire card... go leaking watercooling systems!)
Case: ThermalTake Tai Chi
ThermalTake Pure Power680 APD PSU
Ask for anything else you want to know.


I will check ASUS to see if they have a BIOS update because I'm uncertain if it was ever updated. It could be the problem, but it also may not be.

You might want to keep an eye on task manager to see whats running during the shutdown sequence. I have only seen this once on an XP system and after running chkdsk /f on the system it was resolved. I remember it used to happen all the time on W$ 98 systems although i cant remember the reason. I think there is a registry tweak out there to force an auto shutdown, but i would pursue other solutions first.

Also check that the setting for "automatically restart on system failure" is unchecked and see if that permits a shutdown. I heard somewhere that Easy CD Creator can cause shutdown problems too, i'll see if i can find that info.

*bump*

Need more info on this. The guy is picking up his system tonight. There is no easy cd creator on the system, and I remember what kind of a pain that crap software was on one of my systems. I will run a chkdsk before he picks it up to see if that resolves anything, but I can't say it won't do anything for me until I try it.

No go with chkdsk /f.

Do you have any USB devices connected? Some are known to cause this, mostly HDD's and UBS thumb drives. disconnect anything and retest.
You could also disable the option to resume from standby via keyboard in the bios, especially if your using a usb keyboard.

You could also try disable everything except essential items in the bios. It might be something on-board. You've already eliminated software by reinstalling.

Nope, no USB devices. The BIOS is set to mostly defaults now as I had to replace the battery, so my guess is no resume from standby via keyboard would be enabled by default. I say mostly because I had to disable the CPU fan and switch around the drive configuration, and maybe modify one other essential item.

Resume from suspend via keyboard is normally on by default! Are you sure you disabled it?

Go into the power options in the BIOS and disable all the sleep states, ie. disable the suspend to ram etc.
If you have any PCI cards, remove them and test aswell. It could be an IRQ issue, where the BIOS is not releasing or seeing assigned address's. if this is the cause, it should have been fixed with a BIOS update, unless your using a PCI card that's not very common. Using another PCI slot could alot fix it.

I think it's an ACPI issue with going to standby! Have you tried disabling or enabling support for ACPI 2.0 in the BIOS?

The only PCI card in the system is my sound card, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy X-Gamer I think, but even with it out, it still doesn't shut down properly. When I get a chance to stop by his house (he picked it up two nights ago) I'll check the standby options.

How sure are you that the leaking waterblock didn't damage something else in the system? or when the Xfire GPU fried it did something nasty to the mobo? I can't remember what you said exactly about if both PCIe slots work still, but if you said that one of the slots got damaged that could be the problem right there.

Dan

The system began doing this several weeks after I built it. I fired the system up after installing the new block and everything checked out fine, with exception to one bad card. The Crossfire card didn't send out its display, but the other card put into the main slot (where the burned out X-Fire card was) works just fine.


My friend called me about 15 minutes ago and said the system only powers on sometimes now. Strange, because I powered it up at least a dozen times while it was at my house. Soo.... we may end up buying a new motherboard, video card(s) and CPU again because this sounds like signs of hardware failure.

Try different RAM slots.

kenc51 wrote:Try different RAM slots.

I told him to make sure all hardware was secured in its slots. It has happened once before where on the transport home, some cards wiggled out a bit. I didn't hear back from him yet, so hopefully that was the case. If that doesn't help, I suppose I can have him swap the ram to the next slot over while keeping dual channel.