Crash to reboot?.

[Water boy]

Ok so having had SH4 in the box for months finally decided to give it a go.
Installed Vanilla and started a career. Halfway through mission 2 my PC fell over big time. This resulted in wiping the HD reinstalling everything and basically starting again.
So I reloaded SH4, rebooted, d/l'd 1.4 patch, installed, rebooted, started the game.
It let me go through sub selection etc etc and off I went on my first mission.
I get the screen load up in the sub and about 3 seconds later it crashes. Not to desktop but forces a restart on the PC. No windows is shutting down or error mesages blah blah just grey screen then up comes the boot setups etc.
Never seen that before............
System specs are Win XP home edition V2002 SP3, AMD Athlon XP3000+, 2.17Gig with 1Gig Ram, NVidea GeForce 6600 card. I have a winxp pro upgrade I can install instead if it makes any difference.
I'm deleting it all again and will reinstall vanilla then patch to see if I can get it going again.
I trawled the forum but couldn't find anywhere else it rebooted as opposed to CTD.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

[Water boy]

Forgot to mention..........
Not knowing what boat is what to start in I went for the museum, box opens asking me if I have a ticket?.
Said yes of course, waited while it loaded, up came the first ship, A bb IIRC, click subs and bye bye crash to grey screen + freeze. Had to hard start the PC to get out of it, again no message.

[Arclight]

I quess first thing to do is make sure all the underlying stuff is up to date; install latest system drivers, DirectX and videocard driver. Defrag HD and install SH4 with at least the 1.4 patch.

Start with that and keep us up to date, hopefully we can figure it out.

[GreyOctober]

Hey mate,

To deactivate the "automatic restart" miscrosoft bull$hit, right click on My Computer, choose Properties then select Advanced tab, then look for Startup and recovery and click the Settings button. In this window, uncheck Automatically restart checkbox under Sytem Failure.

If you get the crash again, please post the error here along with your system configuration.

Good luck.

[Soundman]

I could be wrong here, but it seems I recall reading in a long ago thread that the "Museum" is broken. I don't recall if 1.5 or a mod caused this. What happens if you start without the Museum.

sounds like maybe your running out of memory so it dumps and reboots


run mem test and check your memory is still all there, it could be bad connections or dropping it fried something.

it wouldnt hurt to give your mobo a good exam to be sure its not damaged.

what kind of cpu cooler do you have? did you remove it and reseat your cpu and cooler? a big one or a heavy one can bend or break the cpu pin connections very easy when it gets dropped.

[Armistead]

I went through the same thing, but figured fast it was hardware related, just couldn't figure out what.

Are your other games, programs running fine?

Strange, I would reload the game, then my PC would totally crash. The game would act up some before. At this time, I could still boot my PC and start again. However, after a minute same thing. Finally my cp would not boot up, just reboot. Did a clean format and reinstalled winxp. Could get to the DT once, but nothing would work. Finally could never boot to the desktop.

Thought the HD was going bad, because it made a funny whir at startup. Turned out to be one bad memory chip. Took two days to figure it out.

[Armistead]

Looking at your specs...The low end video card may be the problem.

[Water boy]

Thanks guys, all the drivers are up to date, I've deactivated the restart - thanks for that.
Everything else I have loaded just now runs OK - Rome TW, Alexander, sniper elite.

Went in at Vanilla and same story, 2/3 secs inside the boat and goodnight......
Will try again tonight with a fresh install, just to be sure its delete the program using add remove, then the SH4 folder in my doc's - reboot - reinstall from CD, reboot - 1.4 install - reboot.
Thing I cant figure is I got into mission 2 before my PC crashed out - not while playing SH4 either so it will run, used the deck gun all the views etc etc so it went through its paces so to speak.
One other thing, when I first loaded it from CD I had to put in the CD key. Not had to do that ony any reinstall since - am I missing something I should also be deleting here?.
I'll post anything that comes up as an error.............
Again thanks.

BTW, As Er indoors bought SH4 for me I'll just have to fall back on my original plan and tell her I need a new card to run 'her' game.
Never know, might even work.

read this over: http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=133290

sounds like you have leftovers from the uninstall and this will clean it all up for you.

[Water boy]

No joy Friday night despite the reinstall.
wife insisted I went out for a beer or two last night and despite my protestations she dragged me kicking and cussing out of the door.....................
Right, now, having set up the desktop with me as administrator and the brat pack as users windows wont shut down properly. It go's through the motions but stops at the 'windows is shutting down' screen and hangs.
Have to switch off at the tower, thing is having done so and then restarted it boots fine with no disc checking or anything, just boots normally.
A friend advises it may be a new 500Gb external HD my son bought and installed, he advises the externnal drive shouldn' be left on/connected as its simply a m,ass storage device and the pc wont know how to shut it down which keeps i running.
Bit late tonight to go through it but d/l'd the instructions and will give it a go tomorrow.

[Water boy]

Still no joy, tried twice.
Did everything I could from the listed instructions, couldn't find the registry file or any that came close to matching. When I looked for the HKey_local_machine\software\microsoft\windows\curr ent version\uninstall folder nothing came up except Ubisoft - SH4 which was empty.
Rebooted and installed all from CD except gameshadow then rebooted again.
Installed 1.4, rebooted, PC wouldn't restart - ran through the shutdown sequence to windows page then appears to freeze.
Turned off from the tower and restarted.
It didn't go int disc check but booted normally.
Didn't go for the 1.5 patch, didn't install JGSME just ran the sim.
RESULT! - thinks I, changed no settings just went for the water an there I was aboard just off Pearl.
I counted to ten and I was still there, engines on, set course to first mission, on the bridge admiring the view when - wait for it - reboot.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo ooo!

Oh well, wheres the bin?............ only kidding.
Mate of mine confiscated the rope and tablets he caught me with and has promised to attend mine with a free sound/vid card upgrade on Saturday, not sure what he's got spare but one he's running SH4 on OK so it should work.
Thing is its the wifes birthday..... oh well, its her fault for buying it for me I 'spose

[SteamWake]

If you have made sure your drivers are up to date, and have a clean install, a couple of things come to mind.

Outdated version of Direct X

Out of memory

Inadaquate video card (and video card memory)

Possible heat issues

Dont want to hear it runs this or that just fine, SH4 is one of the most 'stressful' games around.

Do us a favor and visit this site http://www.systemrequirementslab.com/referrer/srtest

Select SH4 and run the test and get back to us.

it sounds to me like what happened was some windows data got wiped out from your hard drive from the impact of it falling.


it doesnt mean any hardware got perminently damaged, it just means you should do a complete reformat of the hard drive and then reinstall everything. otherwise you will forever have gremlins acting up in your computer.

hard drives can lose sectors and data from any sudden impacts like dropping them.

[Seacuckoo]

As others have suggested, I'd start with trying to make sure that you have fully functioning hardware, after your box took its fall. We know it fell hard enough to damage the data that was originally on your HDD. You may have already taken these steps, but I mention them for completeness.

Open the case and examine all the connections between your power supply and the motherboard and other components. Make sure all the data cables are snug, as well. Check that all the cards are fully seated into the motherboard (e.g., video card and memory modules). As has been mentioned, make sure that the heatsink is still firmly seated on your CPU. However it is fastened to the MB, make sure that it is still secured.

Since we know that the hard drive took a hit already, download and run the diagnostics utility from your HDD manufacturer's website. You'll want to run the full scan that reads and writes to the whole disk (make sure you have a back up of any data that you don't want to risk losing, in case this test puts your HDD over the edge).

If the HDD seems fine, download and run MemTest86+ overnight, to make sure your RAM hasn't gone bad.

If the RAM seems fine, download and run the torture test of Prime95. Again, I'd let it run overnight. I'd suggest that you also have some utility to monitor the temperature of your CPU before letting this program run for very long. Or, at least boot up and go directly into the BIOS to check the BIOS hardware monitoring to see what temperature your CPU is at under moderate load. I either use the utility that came with the MB or SpeedFan for monitoring CPU temps during stress testing.

Given that your problems started with your system taking a good jarring, this is where I'd start the process of elimination, before focusing in on software issues. Good luck.