Computer freezing with black screen randomly.

[Xerxes]

Hi people, my computer seems to have developed a rather annoying problem. It now completely and randomly locks up with a black screen and the HDD indicator light stuck on and a forced reset is the only way to get it back.

A bit of background on the problem; originally (when my PC was still running Win7) it started to blue screen on me at completely random times (was a KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR, Stop 0x0000007A) after some research I was able to find out that the most likely cause for that issue was either faulty HDD or RAM. I ran Memtest86+ on the machine for over 6 hours and it came up with nothing (so the RAM *seemed* good) and repeated tests of the HDD resulted in errors and/or crashes. However, was able to test it on a Ubuntu live CD that said the HDD was in perfect health. I was skeptical so I bought a brand new HDD (and SSD while I was at it). After which I removed the old HDD and installed the new one and SSD and along with it and I installed my copy of Win8 I bought for the machine a while ago (but hadn't installed yet). I would like to also note when the Win8 installer rebooted the PC (was upgrade edition so installed Win7 first and upgraded from there) the POST screen came up fine and when you normally get the Windows logo was greeted with a black screen and the HDD indicator light stuck on (with the PC frozen). I rebooted the machine and it managed to successfully install Windows. Now all this weekend the machine has been working fine, had a 6+ hour session of Skyrim on Sat and a 4+ hour session of Skyrim Sunday without a single problem, the machine ran without a hitch. However, today I was watching a downloaded video and encoding/burning a DVD, the video finished and walked away for maybe 5 mins to do something and when I came back, the PC with frozen with a black screen and the HDD indicator light stuck on...what could be causing this problem? I've got Memtest running again at the moment just incase it is my RAM slowly failing, but what else could cause this behaviour?

The machine is a:

Core i7 2600 @ 3.4Ghz

8Gb Generic DDR3 RAM

EVGA GeForce GTX670 2Gb

Samsung 840 Series SSD

WD Green 2Tb SATA HDD

Antec TruePower Trio 650W PSU

This machine has worked perfectly fine for ages and only suddenly got this problem. Any thoughts or ideas would be appreciated? if you need more info, just let me know what you need so I can find it out for you. Thanks for any help!

[Xerxes]

I can't edit my first post so....it probably would help if I said what OS I was running! currently running Windows 8 Pro x64 (this is with SSD/HDD) but had this problem in Windows 7 Pro SP1 x64 (this was just HDD no SDD) as well.

[Kosh Naranek]

To me it looks like a HDD controller failure not a HDD failure.

HDD controller failures are very tricky since they come and go like the wind and thus are very difficult to diagnose.

But what does your eventviewer say ?

Does it list controller failures on any of the HDD channels ?

I have never seen black screen freezing with a bad HDD / controller.

Edit ...

So It could be a PSU failure issue ...

[Xerxes]

To me it looks like a HDD controller failure not a HDD failure.

HDD controller failures are very tricky since they come and go like the wind and thus are very difficult to diagnose.

But what does your eventviewer say ?

Does it list controller failures on any of the HDD channels ?

I have never seen black screen freezing with a bad HDD / controller.

Edit ...

So It could be a PSU failure issue ...

I'll be honest, I don't really know my way that well around the event viewer but this seemed to be all I could dig up in relation to what happened (the other error message was simply is started up without shutting down properly).

As you can see, doesn't seem that helpful at all :/ it's the same message everytime the crash happens...

The PSU is pretty old I have to admit, much older then the PC it's in. How would I go about testing it? can you test it?

EDIT: I calculated (roughly) that PSU is ~7 years old, I probably should replace it regardless of whether it's the source of my problems or not shouldn't I?

[Kosh Naranek]

I know OCCT can put some load on your PSU.

It can also show voltages on your PSU while putting load on your system, so you have an idea of the stability.

( you can get it here : http://www.ocbase.com/ )

In eventviewer try looking under the "summary of administrative events", it will list the different event types ...

• Critical
  
• Error
  
• Warning
  
• Information
  
• Audit succes
  
• Audits failure
  

And see if it lists something under critical or error that gives a clue.

There is no reason to replace something if it's working.

[Xerxes]

I know OCCT can put some load on your PSU.

It can also show voltages on your PSU while putting load on your system, so you have an idea of the stability.

( you can get it here : http://www.ocbase.com/ )

In eventviewer try looking under the "summary of administrative events", it will list the different event types ...

• Critical
  
• Error
  
• Warning
  
• Information
  
• Audit succes
  
• Audits failure
  

And see if it lists something under critical or error that gives a clue.

There is no reason to replace something if it's working.

Thanks for that, I took a look in the Event Viewer again where you said and nothing much else useful there unfortunately. Just the two I already found (a Critical and an Error). I do have a ton of Warnings though, for pretty much the same thing too: "Name resolution for the name <name> timed out after none of the configured DNS servers responded."

I'll try that app and see what happens...

EDIT: It doesn't seem to want to run, just gives an error "Core #0 over maximum value! Value Reached : 145 Max Value : 85"

According to that app Core #0 of my CPU is currently 145 degrees (Celsius)!! however, loaded up some other diagnostic tools (Intel Desktop Utilities that came with the board and RealTemp) I got...