Rebooting with 5672.

Hey guys, id like to start by thanking you guys for some of your posts here, they have really helped me with my ACer laptop so far, lots of great stuff here.

Secondly, ive been having some really annoying issues with my 5672.
My laptop seems to randomly reboot every once in a while, getting more and more common and its bugging me to no end. Im really hoping one of you may know some obscure piece of software or a driver thats causing it...

I have misplaced my Recovery CD, though I do have access to a friend with the same laptop but it does not work, probably since I no longer have the recovery partition.

So either way, I have tried installing a fresh copy of XP Pro on it but after the install it gets just past the "windows will change your display settings blah blah blah" grey popup. It will them say saving setting on a blue screen and reboot, never actually making it to the desktop.

At that point I checked for possible hardware issues.
- CHKDSK came up clean.
- Memtest came up clean.
- Ran for 4 hours using a live BartPE disk with NO issue.

So I determined it was a software issue, most likely a driver.
Had the idea of installing using a Service Pack 1 CD and low and behold, windows seemed to work fine for the 2 or so hours it was only SP1. SO I install all the drivers and software in the order given one of of the guides on this site, sorry I forgot who posted it. ANd then Service Pack 2 and all updates.

Everything seemed fine, then after a week or so of almost no use (I used it for Pen and Paper game PDF's lol) It started rebooting randomly, usually after doing something like opening a browser or starting up adobe.

The event log is clean and shows no errors or clues as to what could be causing it. But I have noticed if say I am playing WoW, it has never rebooted while playing this, for however long.

So I am at a loss of what I could even begin checking from here...

Please Acer forum, you're my only hope!

 

Ah it has been a while...

Well I have some further news and ill take this opportunity to bump this post as well since even after a year the only refrence to this problem I can find is my own post here lol.

So I have had to laptop running with Linux on it for the last year and have had zero issues, further telling me its a pieces of software on the laptop that is causing the issue.

A few other things I have tried lately which resparked my interest in fixing this are...

I have installed windows again using a XP Pro with SP3 disk and immediatly got the issue again of it saving settings and rebooting before loging in.

I have also located MY acer recovery DVD i made for the system, and while the one for an identical laptop did not work (maybe it was the disk) this one seems to work just fine even without the recovery partition. It successfully goes through and does the recovery and gives me no errors. Then on bootup it reboots. I try going into safe mode and it tells me not all the files were installed correctly and I need to reinstall windows.

So if anyone has any advice or auggestions please let me know...

 

What BIOS version are you using? Is your graphic chipset the x1600 or x1400? Are you using the original hard drive?

 

Ill have to get back to you on the BIOS, i believe I changed it to the latest Euro BIOS back in the day, same problem with it.

Its the X1400 Video card and no its not the original drive, its a replacement drive from Acer. 120GB seagate.

 

I'm still running my 5672 with x1400 graphics using WinXP SP3 and I'm not having any problems. If you're using the lastest drivers (which are now fairly old) you should not be having any problems. If you had the original hard drive, I'd say that it was failing, mine did and I needed to get a new hard drive. I'm still inclined to think that it is your hard drive, if you can, either try a different hard drive or using SpinRite to find any defects.

 

If you want to do a full restore let me know. I can get you an .iso of the recovery DVD.

 

Id love to be able to get far enough to actually install the latest drivers, but this is happening first thing after a clean install.

Im fairly certain the harddrive is fine, it passes the seagate diagnostic tools and was running an OS without any issues...just no WIndows XP.

Right now im trying to get a SP0 or SP1 professional CD and see if I can get it up and running with that. Ideally id like to just get a ghost image of someones drive with the acer partition on it and run the recovery from that, see if that does anything.

From everything ive done im lead to believe its a Service Pack 2 related issue, but im having no luck finding any references to similar problems from anyone else.

 

I've had no problems installing and running with SP2 and then SP3 on my 5672 w x1400. I do not think that SP2 is the problem especially from a clean install. I'm still going with the hard drive, there my be a few bad sectors that aren't being flagging that Windows is using and screwing you up on. I can't think of anything else. I'm just a little leery of the Seagate notebook drives, mine and several others have failed on the 5672. I know your's is a newer different drive, but still.

 

I ran the Acer recovery DVD again.
Upon startup it still reboots. It says "please wait..." for a few seconds, then shows a blue screen that appears like its a windows setup screen for new laptops (theres no text on it though) then reboots. In safe mode I get "The system is not fully installed" error and cant do anything in safe mode.

I found this fix and it seems to have worked, i can now get into safe mode just fine....but normal mode is still rebooting and doing the same thing -_-

http://www.dynamoo.com/blog/2007/03/system-is-not-fully-installed-windows.html

So finally (for now) I have installed a SP3 copy of XP pro onto a different harddrive and it still has the same issue.

*curls up into a ball and cries*

 

Ok...

Luckily I am at work right now and have access to all this because Im pretty sure ive confirmed it is Service Pack 2 that is the culprit.

I found a SP0 XP Pro cd and installed it...

Tadah...system boots to desktop no problem.
I install service pack 1 and again, no problem.
I forgoe installing all the drivers yet and install service pack 2 and cross my fingers...

bam...problem is back. System starts up, then says "saveing settings" and then reboots.

 

You got me stumped. I went from Win XP Pro SP1 to SP2 to SP3 RC and finally to the final release of SP3 with no problems. This on my 5672 with x1400 graphics with the latest BIOS off the Acer Europe site. One last thing you may want to try is using nlite to create a new Win XP install disk. Use the SP0 disk then using nlite, slipstream SP3 onto it. So essententially you'll have a Win XP SP3 disk with the original Win XP install.

 

maybe after updating to SP1 you should update to the most current BIOS... then install all the latest drivers from the http://support.acer-euro.com site...

reboot after each driver... (since service packs can also contain driver updates you may find it is a particular device who's driver is being changed by sp2!!!)

if you get all DRIVERS UPDATED and still have NO ISSUES... create a SYSTEM RESTORE POINT... and then go to http://www.update.microsoft.com and choose CUSTOM so you can UNCHECK SP3 & SP2 if it pops up these would be listed in the CRITICAL subsection,, yet install any other updates that are listed under the CRITICAL, OPTIONAL and DRIVER subsections of updates.. just DO NOT INSTALL SP2 or SP3 at this point!

then reboot again after this round of updates...

now try SP3 but do it by downloading the file from this link and then running it... it also creates a RESTORE POINT just for your saftey so you can undo any back effects SP3 might cause

if it fails you should be able to press F5 durring reboot and choose SAFE MODE (the top of the list) and then click cancel to start the system restore process which will roll back the system to SP1...

you can totally skip SP2 since SP3 contains all of the SP2 updates as well as all new updates that apply to your PC...

BTW are you installing the SP2 by using windows update or are you downloading it as a FILE that can be burned on a CD and used to install on multiple PCs.. (the administrators version of SP2)

once again,,, here is the link to the ADMINISTRATOR'S DOWNLOAD of SP3