Optical drives cause restart

[smilingroadrunner]

Just throwing up a balloon for some possible ideas to try to track down the cause of this problem. On occasion for the last few months, loading a disk or sometimes when completing a burn our computer would shut down - restart, seemingly of no consequence just irritating. This past Saturday the problems seems to have become acute. Mainly centers around the Samsung TS-H552B CD/DVDW usage, but the alternate DVD-ROM GDR8163B sometimes also will trigger the restart action. The offending disks (mainly these are data backup disks, that have worked successfully all of the time in the past) sometimes will work, sometimes will fail, it seems to be a toss of the dice as to whether the optical drives will recognize and read the disks successfully or cause the restart. The computer will not boot up correctly as long as the disks remain in the drives. Current antiviral, and spyware programs seem to indicate no problems, before or after the problem became acute. There has been no new software additions, or updates (other than automatic windows updates approx August 9-10), no new downloads, or updates ---previous update probably was latest update of Ripit4Me approx week-10 days ago. Use of Registry Mechanic did not seem to turn up anything unusual. It seems that if I totally turn off the computer for 5-10 min and then restart, I have greater success in the drives working successfully. Initially I thought use of the CD/DVD writer to a greater frequency, that possibly my writer was failing, but the ROM also causes the restart problem.
Im thinking this is possibly a software problem or something in BIOS??? but not really that experinced in computers. Attempt to do a "GoBack" type restore to an earlier date did not seem to resolve the problem. I'm just looking for some feed back or possible ideas to consider as I really would like to avoid a total system restore-reformat if possible.

[smilingroadrunner]

Sorry, forgot to mention, Im pretty sure that the Firmware for the drives is current, I had updated the Samsung in the past.

[Skith]

The PSU may be a possible culprit. Voltage irregularities can cause reboots and the power draw from the optical drives might be triggerring it, but this is only a guess. The fact that turning off the system for 5-10 min helps may indicate a heat problem. (CPU, RAM, PSU, chipset, I'm not sure if the optical drives overheating would cause a reboot).

[redwudz]

What Skith said. I would be suspicious of the power supply also. And next the RAM modules. You can boot into the BIOS page and you may get voltage/temperature readings there, depending on the motherboard.

Usually temperature problems are more common when you have a CPU intensive operation, like encoding. If you suspect this, open up the computer and blow out the dust and run it for a while without the side covers. If no problems, then overheating may be the problem.

For RAM, it's a little harder. There are memory test programs out there like Memtest86 that you might try: http://www.memtest86.com/ I usually substitute known good memory, but if you don't have any available, Memtest may show up something.

This really sounds more like a hardware problem. It still may be software related, but if you rule out the PS and the RAM, it might be easier to diagnose.

[Skith]

There is one more thing, I (think) seem to recal reading about someone with a similar problem, and I think it turned out to be a bad IDE cable (some wires were cracked/severed). So carefuly examine your IDE cables.

Of course, I might have imagined the whole idea... but I thought it was worth mentioning.