Dell GX620

[SuffolkComputers]

Had a client call me about his GX620 that has problems rebooting. It's roll is a POS machine, RAID with 2 2.5 Samsung drives, 512mb ram and a p4 on windows xp.

Got there, first thing I did was open it up and change the thermal paste, check for poped caps and check the power supply, paste was flaky and uneven so i reapplied but the power supply and caps looked good.

Next I ran 3 passes of memtest, good. RAID utility says healthy and I did a surface scan with no errors. Did a stress test on the CPU for 20 minutes, no errors.

Also noticed the two 2.5 drives where very close together and pretty warm to the touch, running at 88f on idle. No fans pointed at them.

Told them my findings and also to call me if they had any problems.

They called later, said it had restarted 6 times already and it's much worse. Me and the owner decided to buy a new unit and overnight it and swap the drives from old box to new box.

I have a bad feeling its the drives or windows that's causing these crashes. No evidence though...no bsod and no abnormal errors in the event log. I know this is going to bite me in the ass when we swap drives and it keeps doing it though!

Any advice would be appreciated. The drives are full of bespoke software that he apparently does not have support for and I do not have the time to go over it all and reinstall everything onto a new install unless I absolutely have to

Thanks TN!

 

[ShinyTech]

Is it a hard crash, bluescreen or what
If its a hard crash it might be the PSU
If its bluescreen prolly software problem depending on error message

 

[SuffolkComputers]

It's a hard crash, reboots automatically. In my experience this is power or heat issues. Maybe I'm on the right track and just over thinking again....thanks shiney

Edit: just hoping overheating hard drives aren't causing this

 

[The Silent Hobo]

Can you pull it up in safe mode and see if that causes it to reboot? it could quite possibly be overheating, any chance of taking the side of the pc case off blowing a small fan in there and maybe installing Core Temp and see if that says how hot it really is getting?

 

[NETWizz]

The 620 doesn't even support RAID at least without a RAID Card...

 

[Rob_NNCC]

What form factor is this pc?

I had a SX280 that would reboot without a event log, bluescreen or minidump. I replaced the Mobo with a spare I had, I checked the RAM, checked the HDD long test, and several other things. Turned out to be a corrupted screen saver. I think you need more testing unless you want wild speculation.

 

[seedubya]

I think you need more testing unless you want wild speculation.

This ↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑↑

No mention of checking eventvwr, no mention of "disable system restart on failure" for starters.

 

[SuffolkComputers]

I did say I checked the event viewer actually...

I did what I could in the two hours I was given to troubleshoot it. Temps on the CPU where normal during the CPU stress test I did. And I totally forgot to disable restart on failures

We'll see what happens when I swap the raid array to the spare PC I ordered now, I still think its a heat issue or power supply. I talked to the staff earlier today (it's a POS for a very busy fast food chain) and they said it only restarts during peek times, which points to heat issues.

Also it's the small desktop version of the gx620!

Thanks for the comments everyone

 

[seedubya]

I did say I checked the event viewer actually

Sorry, missed that! ♫♫♫♫♫

 

[DanB]

cable?

I have had this happen with bad sata cable. Just enough errors to cause crashes.. Heat brings out the worst problems.