Hello everyone, I bought a rebuilt dell t3400 on ebay. ($600 buy it now.) I first noticed that it would restart randomly, loosing work and just basically annoying. the computer apparently was a reject from dell for some reason, (seller said it may have been to do with the case) so the service tag does not work on dell's site. It has a duo2core 2.33 mgz processor (dual core), 4 gigs ram, 2 identical 80 gb hard drives, lightscribe dvd, nvidia 512mb video card and a corsair hx520 power supply. apparently original dell motherboard. The seller started installing the xp operating system, I finished it. I then decided to do a raid 0 on the hard drives, seems to have worked, it saw 1 drive (doubled in size) said it was normal and bootable. Then I reinstalled everthing, flashed the bios to a04, upgraded the internet explorer to 7.0 (mistake) and procedded to install autocad, word, works, some surveying software, ect.. Computer seemed ok except for the restarts. sometimes it would do it 4 or 5 times right in a row and then be ok for the rest of the day. It started getting worse and worse to the point where it would restart anywhere at anytime. I ran fdisk from a win me startup floppy and did a basic format. (ME was the only startup floppy I had that would work.) I never made an xp start up disk. I deleted the raid and formatted again from the floppy. I think that should have gotten rid of the raid. I try again and again to get to the xp recoverery console, after many attempts I finally get there and format the c: drive. I finally get to the install from xp cd and it wants to format the c: drive with ntfs, I let it. I now have c: drive formatted with ntfs and d drive is fat32, i think. I try to get back to install xp from cd, after 250 restarts, and I just can't get there. Computer restarts anywhere at anytime. Dell screen, dos A: prompt, windows checking your hardware screen, windows trying to install minimal files to get to the repair or install screen or even on restart it will crash and restart. anywhere at anytime. I have disabled all ports, usb serial parallel, and plugged in a basic keyboard, It's pretty stripped down now. I reseated the ram and video card, checked all my cables, (hard to tell with cables) removed ram and started with 1 gb dimm and then another 1gb dimm to see if I had bad ram. No difference. I flashed the bios back to a02, only difference I see is that it now wants me to press a key to reboot from CD. Very few messages comming from this machine. The first one I saw was "corrupt windows\system32\config\system But I don't think that matters now with two reformatted hard drives. The only message I see now is NTLDR missing cntrl alt del to restart. Sometimes I get that sometimes not. Try to reboot to cd, somtimes it starts inspecting my computer hardware, somtimes not. Restarts anywhere at anytime, constantly. It will even crash at the a: prompt when I can get to it. It may be that the raid 0 left enough bits in the root sector to create a pocket??? or something like that. I did try to download bcupdate.exe to address this but it said it was not a dos command. When I boot to floppy and get an A: prompt, I did a dir c: and it says "invalid media type reading drive c: Any help here would be greatly appreciated as my seller on ebay, who says he is a certified dell tech, is out of ideas and will not fix this faulty system. thank you, Rich

All this and no one has mentioned the possibility overheating or a faulty power supply. Two very common causes of spontaneous re-starts. Some technician if he never mentioned either of the above, but then perhaps he know that but didn't want you to know it as well. Get rid of the RAID, you don't need it and it is an unnecessary complication. You don't need a Windows XP startup disk as everything can be done from the CD. Partitioning, formating and installing. Best thing to do is to start again. Boot from the Windows XP CD, delete all partitions, create a single partition with the Windows XP CD, format it and install. Stuart

Thank you for your reply, I tested the power supply with paper clip from green to black wire, it works fine. Problem occurs warm or cold. At first I thought it was an overheating problem because it worked for longer after being shut down, this was during the first couple of days. Now it doesn't matter. I am lucky if I can get through the windows installation process to even get to the point of formatting. It took me 5 hours to get to the install screen and format with ntfs. Just getting it to stay on without rebooting is the problem.

"I tested the power supply with paper clip from green to black wire, it works fine" Are you crazy? You test by putting a volt meter on the black line. You never cause a short like you did or you can damage/blow the fuse in the power supply. Do a proper test!!! You need to know the voltage. If less then spec you will see sparks with your paperclip but you don't know the voltage. You may have previously damaged the mainboard with improper electrical precautions [not grounding yourself first] It could also be something has gotten loose. Reseat the cpu/ram and any addin cards. Another step is to clear the bios back to defaults and do a minumum config to see if that makes a difference. Imagine the power of knowing how to internet search http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/Teachin...

Thank you for your reply, The paper clip suggestion came directly from corsair, power supply maker. I was pretty careful about grounding before going in. I did reseat the ram and video card to no avail. I just reset the bios to defaults and it saw the optical drive and the one remaining hard drive I have installed. Now it only says NTLDR IS MISSING PRESS CTRL+ALT+DEL TO RESTART I now try to get it to boot from cd and it consistantly crashes and restarts at the "setup is inspecting your computers hardware configuration" It will do that about 5 times and then I am left with a blinking curser in the upper left hand corner. Motherboard was thought as well, but the inconsistancies where and when it fails are confusing me.

>> "I tested the power supply with paper clip from green to black wire, it works fine" << All that does is allow the power supply to run when disconnected from a motherboard. Even with a volt meter it will only give to minimal information. All that will tell you is that the power supply probably works. To properly test a power supply you need to test it under load and the equipment to do that can be expensive. Without the necessary equipment the next best thing is substitute with a known good power supply. That will either confirm or eliminate the power supply as the source of the problem. The NTLDR missing and other errors messages are to be expected with an aborted OS Install. Delete the partition and start again from scratch. Stuart

Seems like you paid way too much money for a computer that was trouble from the beginning. I'd say, sell it for parts, and buy a new one from Dell (you can get a brand new one for less than $600.00.) Life's more painless for the brainless.