Completely power off during restart

[Zyan]

Problem:  Whenever selecting "restart" from windows 7, the computer will shut off completely before POST.  (i can hear the hard drive/fan stopped, and restart by itself 2-3 seconds later.)  I believe this can be very bad for hard drives.

This never happens on my other computers; is this normal with gigabyte motherboards? 

Specs:
GA-Z68X-UD3H-B3 with F8 BIOS
2500K overclocked to 4.0ghz at 1.25 vcore.
XFX Core 550W PSU
8GB GSkill Jigsaws 1600mhz 1.5v
XFX 6870 video card
3 drives in raid 5; plus 4 other individual hard drives.
freshly installed win7, with all drivers installed.

everything was purchased/installed last week. 

Thanks alot,
Zyan

[Aussie Allan]

 Well with the clocking involved...... it sounds like on the boot phase (cold or restart) your motherboard/BIOS is not happy with some of your settings.

 This is normal on gigabyte later boards as the board as stated is not to happy so is rebooting with a minor change in the bios to effect a stable boot.

 With several drives, 1600mhz memory at 1600 and a borderline Power supply...... it could be several things that might need tweaking, personally I would be looking at a bigger PSU......in fact this also could be one of the issues that is stopping you booting to windows cleanly...... drive can pull from 2 to 3 times there rated draw in the run up phase which can last from 2 to 3 seconds ....up to 6 to 8 second depending on drive size and manufacture!

 Hope this help!

 Aussie Allan

[Zyan]

Aussie,

  thanks for the reply, that was the next thing i was going to try. 
1.  reset cmos
2.  disconnect all hard drives except 1, and disconnect video card. 
3.  try a new power supply. 

  maybe i wasn't clear in my first message, the PC boots into windows fine.  And i already ran all sorts of burn-in software non-stop for 2-3 days.  System is great and stable.  The only problem is whenever i need to restart for some reason, (driver install, bios change, etc..) the pc will always turn itself off completely, wait 2-3 seconds, and then turn itself back on.  When it turns itself back on, there's no message saying frequency/voltage improper setting, as i've seen during overclocking. 

thanks for the replies, i really appreciate it.  i'm going to try those things tonight. 

Zyan

[Aussie Allan]

 Zyan ... good move Batman!

 So you don't miss anything....take a note or capture of ALL your BIOS settings..... I suspect it's making a small change somewhere, might just help you nail down the fault in quick time instead of trying 600  different things to fault find.


  Full Extended BIOS reset is the smart place to start ( including poping the battery) with minimum toys attached,...... make sure you apply "Optimized Defaults" at the first re-boot then configure to your setup..........have a fun evening..... my gut tells me it's a small problem, unfortunately they can be a bugger to find     

 Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

The "double start" is a common occurance with Intel systems when overclocked. Sometimes it can be cured by optimising some BIOS entry but quite often it is here to stay unless the OC is removed.

[Zyan]

alright, i resolved this; even though i don't understand what caused it. 

all i did was a bios reset.  And then change the setting back to what i had one by one. It works!  now that the bios is identical to what i had, and the system no longer power off during restart.  Very weird, maybe bios is corrupted somewhere that only a reset can fix? 

Thank you all for the help. 

[Dark Mantis]

Well I am happy to hear that yopu have managed to fix the problem and without any great hardship or cost which is always a bonus! I wouldn't be surprised if the issue returned though as I said before it isn't an uncommon nuisense.