System restart during long disk reads (scandisk, norton av scan, long searches)

Control Panel, open System, go to the Advanced tab, click Settings under
Startup and Recovery, remove the check from "Automatically Restart" under
System Failure. This will cause
the system to blue screen instead of restarting on errors and the
information on the blue screen may give a clue as to the source of the
issue.

Open Control Panel, open Administrative Tools, open Event Viewer, look for
errors corresponding to the crash, double click the error, the information
contained within may give a clue as to the
source of the problem.

Assuming you have an XP CD and not a recovery CD, place the XP CD in the
drive, when the setup screen appears, select "Check System Compatibility,"
the report it generates may point to problem hardware or software on your
system. If you do not have an XP CD, you can download this application
known as the Upgrade Advisor from the following site:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/p...ng/advisor.asp
Note: If you have access to a broadband connection it might be best to
download using that as this is a rather large download.

Check for the latest drivers for your hardware, especially your graphics
card and soundcard and all peripherals connected to your system. No not use
Windows Update for this, go to the device manufacturer's web sites and if
you install updated drivers, ignore the message about drivers being unsigned
by Microsoft.


--
Michael Solomon MS-MVP
Windows Shell/User
Backup is a PC User's Best Friend
DTS-L.Org: http://www.dts-l.org/

"Seve" <sluce@directlink.net> wrote in message
news:05a001c37a44$2607b530$a001280a@phx.gbl...

> My system will do an abrupt shutdown/restart during
> scandisk, antivirus system scan, and sometimes during
> long searches on the drive. I am not sure if this is a
> hardware problem (had done the same with diferent drives)
> an operating system problem, or a virus.
>
> It appears to do this mainly on drive C which is the
> system drive and then mainly after some time of the
> application running. This makes me suspect buffer or
> some other factor related to reading a large amount of
> data from disk.
>
> The system was upgraded from Windows ME two years ago and
> the system drive is formatted with the FAT32 file system
> (80MB drive). The problem did not start until some time
> (many months) after the upgrade to Windows XP.
>
> Any suggestions on what may be the problem?