Pc Lock up due to inactivity

[KindledSpirit]

Hi, all the pc in question is a Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of DDR400 ram a Seagate ST3400832A Barracuda 400GB 7200RPM ATA/100 8MB basically thic pc acts as a filesever and for the past couple of days it has been locking up on me from what i can tell on points of pc activity the problem is it doesn't consider a workstation pulling data as activity, I thought it was a program i'd installed because i upgraded got the problem then downgraded back to the old one but it's even locking up when neather program is left running. I'm using AVG free as an Anti-Virus ( great it's locked up again) it seems to do it after about 15 to 20 mins and before anyone asks no the power management settings are all set to Never. I've just run a Defrag scan on it over night and came down and it was locked again but the scanner was off. also side note i only recently installed that (yeh my bad i know i should have done esp with the amount of file usage it does) HDD is 42% full and had 1.82 fragments per file if that helps probably not.

the defragger i installed is called Diskkeeper Enterprise

Please any help i would be great ful i'm at the point where i wanna rip the HDD out and put it on the workstation as a secondary just to get at the files properly but unsure to as if it could be a Virus. (AVG is set to update and run every night)

Also this pc has been on for 24/7 for about 8months. (give or take)

 

[Spike]

Is it a hard crash, or a temporary lock up?

Is there any obvious activity from it when it happens? I know you use a KVM switch on it, so have you tried switching it over to the fileserver and seeing if there's anything you can "see" when it happens, like a screensaver or the likes, or a program firing up?

 

[KindledSpirit]

starts off as a total lock then about 10mins later will reset itself on its own accord. i've taken it off the KVM completely and it's happened so it's not that. oh side note i use a keyboard KVM (where u have to press a pattern of buttons to switch i can't even switch too my mates pc from the fileserver when it happens not sure about other way around

the only programs i can see running one time was AVG everything else was off.

 

[Spike]

when you say reset itself of its own accord, do you mean that the whole PC actually restarts, or that it suddenly starts working again?

 

[KindledSpirit]

restarts completely (ps i dont' know what minddumps are else i'd post those too)

 

[Spike]

If you have any minidumps, you'll find them in the %systemroot%\minidumps folder. They have a .dmp extension.

Group about 3-5 of them into a zip file if you have a number of them (best to use the most recent ones) and upload them here.

If you have error reporting turned off though, your machine won't create them (see "system properties" -> advanced tab -> startup and recovery settings page -> and check the "write debugging information" setting on that page to find out if it's off or on. If off, select the "small memory dump" option. when you have a few memory dumps (ie, once it's crashed a few times), turn it back off again.

 

[KindledSpirit]

I've never had this error message come up before but it did it after one of the lock ups hope it helps

 

[Spike]

That'll be your computer failing to write to the Master File Table of your C: partition.

Go to Start -> run _> enter "chkdsk /r" (without the quotes) and press enter. Reboot when prompted, windows will check the disk and reboot.

 

[KindledSpirit]

done and it locks up on stage 4 checking data at 24%

 

[howard_hopkinso]

It might be a good idea to run a hard drive diagnostic utility on the hdd.

You can find a good selection of them HERE.


Regards Howard