Quake3World

In the last month or so, my pc has started to randomly lock up. Normally, it starts to just not respond, but I can still move the cursor, and then it all just stops.

Occasionally, if I leave my pc on, I walk into a blue screen of death, but that's a bit rare. I assume it's related to this problem, but, yeah, whatever.

Thirdly, and this might be the biggest clue, when it locks up, if you just press the reset button instead of turning the power off, then on, it will get black DOS-like screen saying something about cyclic redundancy, but also mentioning nvidia, the maker of my mainboard. I don't remember the exact message, but if it becomes important, I can try to reproduce it.

Things that I have tried to fix it with, and failed --

I thought maybe there were some clogged fans or something. So i cleaned it, apparently pretty thoroughly, with air, etc. It was just as bad, if not worse, when I started it back up again.

Then, though it "felt" like a hardware problem, I reformatted. I was quite happy with the results for the first week or so. Not a single lock-up occurred, and everything seemed to be normal again.

But in the last couple of days, it's just seemed to randomly creep back into my pc. I'm not sure what's going on.

Any ideas?

Cyclic redundancy check is an error relating to data access on a storage device i.e. your CDRom or Hard drive.

It could be that one of your drives is acting flaky, but I've only ever seen this error with CDs, personally.

Do you have a game disk left in the drive lately? Do you have starforce installed on your system? Does scandisk check out on your hard disks?

And also, hows your system temperatures? Check them with motherboard monitor or the mobo monitoring application on your motherboard apps CD.

Well, now I can't reproduce the cyclic error message. I think it COULD be my hdd.

I tried to copy over some folders to a backup partition, and some of the files didn't copy -- could be something related to a faulty hdd.

I agree with Foosky. Odds are good you have a malfunctioning hard drive if it BSAWDS. Tried doing a chkdsk /r ?

try disconnecting power (though it's unlikely this is the case, since by reformatted, I take it you re-installed as well from the drive) to your removable media /cdroms and see how she runs for awhile.