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If it is the CMOS and you try updating or a restore, you could cause some serious fatal errors. You know how you get that message do not shut off pc during update ... well a bad CMOS can cause machine to shut off and start up at random.
This is not entirely correct. A failing CMOS will lose time over hour or days and result in a date that is inaccurate, and mine was a case very much like the one posted. A bad CMOS acts erratic, quite similar or worse than a virus. It loses memory, forgets hard drives, makes keyboards type partial sentences, huge USB connect errors etc, bios issues. The safest, smartest, thing to do first is replace the battery because if you try other solutions when a CMOS is bad you could royally jack up your system and drives. Then one can safely attempt a restore or update or software install or removal if one felt the need to do so. Else the odds are a decent chance of making things worse with the permanent screen of black/blue death. Lost 2 pcs that shut off during an update (nothing to do with CMOS) but the damage was fatal. Lost the C: drive, op system and all data. I've got ancient machines (1999 sony vaio, dell and an hp used as an apache-linux server, etc from 2000-2002 that have never had a CMOS battery replaced yet newer ones failed. They don't make PCs to last like they used to. Cheaper throways parts - and the newer store boughts are cheaper to replace than repair.
Edit: Happy Valentines Day to all.
My computer has been doing that. But it's not a thing that's been happening everyday. It could be days or weeks between the last random restart. But it hasn't happened lately.
The computer started losing time again today (by two hours). So I've got no other choice now, but to go into the PC and change the CMOS batteries.
Everything else seems to be behaving itself. Although Daz Studio's loading time has really slowed. Especially when resetting a character's pose.
The only function a CMOS battery has, is to provide power to preserve BIOS settings (for example time/date) when the motherboard has no other source of power. You can even safely use a computer that has a dead CMOS battery provided that you keep it connected to the mains, and if you do remove the mains, the only trouble you get is that you have to set the time and date and any other changes you have made to the BIOS settings. When a computer is connected to the mains, the CMOS battery is charged, therefore the power is provided from the mains and if the computer looses time, the culprit lies somewhere else..
I do have some 30+ years of experience with these.
I gave you a link to an article about W10 not keeping time, did you read it?
When you go to the Device manager, do you see any yellow exclamation marks there?
I did. DOS is pretty daunting. I didn't get around to doing that, though. If the clock starts to lose time again, then that's what I'll try next.
There was. I've got the external drive plugged into the front of the computer, now. So, if any issues do arise, the USB lead can be accessed more easily.
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UPDATE:
I've changed the battery. The battery has its own "eject lever". So it was pretty easy to change/replace.
While I was in there, I cleaned the fan that's clipped onto the CPU. Its not dust. Its mould/damp dust, so it took sometime.
One of the biggest changes is in BIOS. It was just picking up one thing in the system. But with the new battery, there's three things in the "boot order" section.
My screen issues were fixed at some point in the past few days, too. I used to have two black bars either side of the screen. But they've gone, now.
I've just got to try to render with it now... Except, I can't help but feel that l should start planning for a replacement...
I booted up the computer with the external HDD attached. The computer froze on boot. Putting me back at square one.
So I removed, and put the CMOS battery back. It sorted things, and the PC was repairing itself. I've shut it down again. I'm not sure I want to risk rendering on it.
I get the chills everytime someone mentions the computer or windows repairing it self, too much bad experiences over the years... But make sure the external HDD with external powersource is not connected when you start the computer the next time.
It seems that the computers do not like USB devices that have external power, maybe the external power leaks through the USB cord to the computer and when it doesn't match the power the computer is feeding on the same USB, there will be problems. I believe the computer is just fine and when you get a replacement USB HDD that's powered by the USB cord, everything should work.
So I don't think I ever got an answer to my question:
Is there only one hard drive, and it's connected via the USB port and has the C:\ and D:\ partitions? Or do you have two hard drives: one drive inside the computer that holds the operating system (C:\ and D:\) and a separate external drive that holds data?
My computer BIOS did that (AMD CPU / Gigabyte B450 MB) a couple times actually after BIOS upgrades and they way I fixed it was to rearrange the order of the devices the PC tries to boot off of.
Normally, when the BIOS finds a USB storage device on the bus it tries to boot and if it fails, it goes to the next device on your boot device list until it finds one it can boot off of but for some reason on my PC it would stop after failing on the 1st USB storage device and try no further so to avoid that I put my boot disk to be the 1st device on the boot device list so I didn't get that problem anymore. When you need to upgrade or new install you can always rearrange the list again to have the device with the install/upgrade media 1st on your list.
I have never had any problem with externally powered HDDs I have had as many as 6 attached to my system at one time. I've even let the computer "fix itself" while the hard drives were still connected. I'll admit though that the "fix it" feature of Windows sometimes disappoints me, but it has worked, sometimes.
This probably isn't one of your issues, but I thought I might mention it just in case. I have some external usb hard drives that come formatted as exFat. If I have one of those drives plugged in, my computer will freeze at the Dell logo on start up or reboot. I unplug the drive, press the power button so the light goes out and repress it to restart. The computer starts up and then I reconnect the drive. I know you have other issues. But if the computer will boot without the drive then check to see how it is formatted. Since I discovered this issue. I always try to reformat a new drive as NTFS. There doesn't seem to be a way to reformat an exFat drive without losing data.
Not a problem if the external power is not leaking back to the computer and confusing the mechanism that monitors USB power, making the Bios think there is a problem and refusing to co-operate or cause another kind of problems.
I was working on replies, but my draft wasn't saved.
@PerttiA Windows repairing itself doesn't fill me with confidence either. To me, it's a stop gap between "Windows is okay.... For now".
@ebergerly One HDD inside the PC, which has two partitions (c:\ and d:\). c:\ houses Windows, and d:\ has all of the Daz stuff.
Then there's the external HDD, which is sat on my desk.
@KevinH I have read about exFAT thing. The only problem that I have is that I don't have another device to back up everything on that external HDD, in order to format it.
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I have an update.
The computer is still keeping time, and its been okay with booting and shutting down.
Except today, it's had a random restart. And the USBs lost power... Although, I'm not sure if Windows froze/crashed before the USBs stopped working. Whatever it was, I had to shutdown the computer via the power button.
My computer was loading Daz, when the random restart happened. But I'm not sure if that was a coincidence, or not. I had, however, just removed the External HDD plugged in a small USB memory stick into the same slot (again, coincidence... or not?).
I've lost track of what's happening there. But at this point, I would be trying a known good power supply. But that's not something everybody has in their boxes of spare parts. And it's not a cheap fix if you don't need it and involves lots of wire unplugging and routing and plugging in again in tight spaces with stubborn sockets and resultant scraped knuckles and naughty words.
I just updated my Gigabye B450 DS3H WIFI motherboard BIOS again today to the BIOS that supports Ryzen 5 5000 series CPUs (yeah!), but as usual it rearranged the boot order of my storage devices so that my PC wouldn't boot. I had to go in the BIOS and put my boot device 1st in the list.
Also, CAUTION! If you enable bitlocker in Windows 10 and upgrade your BIOS or CPU without turning off bitlocker beforehand you will loose access to your boot drive. I had to use my mobile phone and go to the MS online storage for my account and get my key there. However, that done, my computer boots again normally. You can print out the key and keep it with your books or something instead of online though.
I think I'd rather remove the CMOS battery, rather than poking around the power supply ^^'
My computer doesn't have BitLocker. Everytime I go to find it, I get directed to the Windows Store.
I've been having a poke around in BIOS, and found another fan listed in there. Its listed as CHA_FAN. But its got "N/A" beside it. Plus, almost everything, apart from one item, has disappeared from the boot order.
The only plus, is that the clock is still keeping time.
Also, its had another Blue Screen of Death today:
I'm now worried that it's a RAM problem. If it is, and I put the old RAM back, then I can't use the computer for rendering.
UPDATE:
I've got MEMTEST running on the computer at the moment. It found 2 CPUs, but only 1 is active. Is that normal?
atikmdag.sys sounds like a driver file, do you have an ATI card?
AFAIR I had that stop code too when I had a bad RAM stick.
AFAIR yes, probably because one is sufficient for testing RAM, but there should be an option for using multiple CPUs/cores.
Testing RAM can be tricky though, I had what looked like a RAM problem but Memtest+ didn't find any errors even after many hours of testing. Then I bought PC-Doctor Toolbox to test the rest of the hardware, and when I ran the Memory Stress Test it has it found RAM errors immediately. After some more testing I found that Memtest+ would detect the bad stick, but only if it was the only one installed. Usually Memtest+ is reliable though, but it looks like the one PC-Doctor has is better in some cases.
Personally at this point I'd be thinking about buying a new rig. Perhaps scavenge some components that you know are working OK but It seems to me you're fighting a losing battle.
Well here is a troubleshooter process for you to try:
Troubleshoot blue screen errors (microsoft.com)
Trouble shooting computers is soooo much fun.
Doing it remotely is a job.
It's fascinating, but scary, to watch this thread. I hope you find a cure, really. My days of diagnosing computers are long past, but the one comment that hit me was your reference to mold and dampness.
That can mean corrosion in any number of areas if it's widespread. I wonder how long it has been developing.
This has made me a bit more nervous about my machine, as it has been overheating enough that I can no longer render in Iray, and the new one I gathered parts for is on hold due to, you know, GPU availability...
I wish the best of luck to you. I admire your stick-to-it attitude. Wish I could help.
AMD Radeon (AMD A6-6400K APU).
Okay.
Okay.
Memtest found no errors on my PC either.
I am thinking about it. In fact, the replacement that I'm after is £1000-£2000. So, it's all I can think about.
Thanks for the link :)
Rollback and/or uninstall drivers. Honestly, between the USBs and any other driver, I wouldn't know where to start.
I wish I knew more about computers. I'd love to be some kind of "technical wizard", and be able to repair it myself.
Over 13 years (since we've moved into this house), we've lost quite a few things to damp and mold. It was always going to end up doing the same to the computer.
I've heard about the GPU shortage. The repair shop that I go to has had to stop taking orders for custom gaming PCs because of it.
Thank you, and thank you for posting.
UPDATE:
I spoke to the guy who owns the repair shop/workshop, he's going to take a look at the machine tomorrow. He thinks there's something wrong with the PC's HDD, and he also seems to think that the clean install of Windows only 'papered over the cracks'. I'll stick a list of problems onto the side of the machine. I'm sure it'll make good bedtime reading for him, lol!
It will be interesting to see what he says about your pc problems. They will be able to run some tests to narrow down the faulty component/s for you. If it's just a new HD I'd suggest a SSD and store your libraries on a bigger external drive. My 4 year old SSD still loads windows in less than 10 seconds and I'd never go back to a HDD.
I felt that I couldn't do anymore. That's why I decided to see if their shop/workshop was open. I haven't heard anything from the shop at this time. So, I guess it's down to the old adage of "no news is good news".
I have been looking at replacement drives (just in case). If its a reasonable price, I'd like upgrade to a 2TB HDD, or SSD (providing my computer would still function reasonably well with new/modern tech).
UPDATE:
I got a call from the repair shop. The hard drive is failing.
He gave me the option to replace it with an SSD, or a HDD. Because we've chatted about Daz Studio in the past, he recommended an SSD. So, that's what its being replaced with. It's only 1TB. Plus, he's backed-up all of my Daz stuff, so I won't lose anything. ^^
*Just one question, does an SSD slowly fail over time, like a normal HDD. Or does it just work one day, and completely stop working the next (making data impossible to retrieve)?
Thank you to everyone who has replied to this thread, so far.
SSD do lose cells over time but do not generally fail instanteously. There are numerous explanations of how SSD's work (and fail) on YouTube. But for a good quality SSD that isn't used to its full capacity all the time. The number of "extra" available memory cells usually provides many years of fast, faithful service. Also, when you determine what brand of SSD is installed in your machine, go to the manufacturer's website and they should have a downloadable free tool that queries the detailed status of your SSD drive and reports on its level of degradation.
It's important to remember than an SSD cell can be read any number of times without degradation, but does have a limited number (although a somewhat high number) of times that it can be written to. Quantum Physics in action. Also, the controller within the SSD tries to spread out the usage of the cells so that they wear somewhat evenly.
Edited to add: Failing cells don't necessarily mean you lose data. There are a couple of error-correcting mechanisms in the SSD and your computer to automatically take care of most problems by repairing bad data and moving it to good cells.
1) What are the advantages of types of SSD? (tri vs quad storage cells) (Very good explanation of SSD principles and behavior)
2) How long will my SSD last?
3) How fast will my SSD run?
Contact your repair person and ask what brand and type of SSD is being installed. A little more money now, might save a bigger expense later. I recommend tri-cells technology (see 1st clip above) instead of quad cells. I also recommend well known manufacturers like Samsung or Crucial instead of no-name brands. 1TB, 2.5", SSD are about $100-$130 (US) The 1TB size is about right because 500GB is too small for the large data write operations (shortens SSD life) required by DAZ Studio work. And 2TB is still expensive ($200+).
If you have a second storage drive, preferably an internal spinning hard drive, in your computer then it can be assigned to be your temporary space for repetative huge write operations like Photoshop cache or Win10 swap space or WinZip temp space or DAZ Studio temp space. Saves wear and tear on the SSD cells, at the expense of speed.
Well... I am glad you are getting closer to resolution.
I was getting ready to suggest a "go fund me".
@LeatherGryphon
Thanks for the videos. I sort of understand SSDs a little more now. I have no idea what brand they've used for my replacement drive. It could be one that I've never heard of. They have quite a range in the shop.
@Chumly
I've thought about a go fund me, but, I don't feel "worthy" enough to create one (maybe if I was a brilliant 3D artist, I'd feel different about it).
UPDATE:
I got the PC back today. The repair guy said that the computer has been running really well, and he didn't encounter any problems.
Although my Daz stuff was backed up, I'm missing over half of my content. I'm also missing another Daz Library, where I kept the stuff that I created/converted.
As for the machine itself, the PC froze, again. The USB ports seem to lose power. Its like nothing has changed.
I'm worn out, and it looks like I won't be rendering anything anytime soon.