GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

[Spongebob]

I had to reformat my computer and reinstall everything. Now Vice City makes my system restart. No other game does this so far just Vice city and it never use to before the reformat, bios update, and graphic driver update but now it does. I'm using a P4 3ghz system with a MSI Neo2 mainboard and ATI radeon 9800 video card. Anyone know of this problem or think they know a possible solution? I also have reinstalled Call of Duty and its new expasion, Starwars Battlefront, and Rome Total war since the reformat and they all seem to work good but ViceCity only goes for a couple minutes a best before it reboots the system. I have tried tinkering with bios settings but nothing seems to help. Also tried turning off fast write but that didn't do it either. I doubt its my Ram since its worked good before and my systems well vented so I'm stumped.
I checked the event veiwer in WinXP and I have several yellow excaimation marks under applications with the below message which is possibly related to the restart while playing the game but I'm not sure and a I noticed a bunch of red x's under system which I'm sure have alot to do with it. So what should I do?

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: Userenv
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1517
Date: 10/2/2004
Time: 9:31:31 AM
User: NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM
Computer: MSI
Description:
Windows saved user MSI\MSI USER registry while an application or service was still using the registry during log off. The memory used by the user's registry has not been freed. The registry will be unloaded when it is no longer in use.

This is often caused by services running as a user account, try configuring the services to run in either the LocalService or NetworkService account.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
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I have lots of these with red x's in system events, I think from every time the game has rebooted the system I'm guessing. And I know it has nothing to do with the game disc. I'm pretty sure atapi has something to do with the video card but I need your knowhow to tell me what it is.


Event Type: Error
Event Source: atapi
Event Category: None
Event ID: 9
Date: 10/2/2004
Time: 8:16:54 PM
User: N/A
Computer: MSI
Description:
The device, \Device\Ide\IdePort1, did not respond within the timeout period.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp

[Yawgm0th]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

By the looks of the error, either your CD drive or hard drive is somehow involved. Try reinstalling the game, using a different CD drive or even a no-CD crack (which we will not provide you with). Then again, I may be going about this totally wrong...

BTW, if you're wondering about ATAPI...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&safe=off&client=firefox-a&q=define%3A+atapi&btnG=Search

[Spongebob]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

Yeah, that error really seems to point toward the CD-rom drive according to Microsoft but I use a NoCD patch for the game and it worked fine on this system until now (since reformatting), tried reinstalling the game even though GTA Vice City needs no registry entries in Windows XP to run and that didn't help. I guess my next move is to disconnect the CD drive to see if that helps but I actually think I'll have a better chance at nailing this thing by installing previous drivers for my video card versus the new version but I really don't want to do that too much, I think I'll wait about a week until ATI post the new ones this month.


UPDATE---- I tried disconnecting the CD-Rom drive but the game still restarts the system.

Does anyone know if a graphics driver can restart a system if it's incompatable with this game? I figure the game might crash, but system restarts???? I wish I knew someone else that is using ATI's video driver version 6.14.10.6476 with ViceCity to compare.

[Yawgm0th]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

Graphics drivers can cause these types of problems, but I've heard nothing about any batch of Catalysts have problems with GTA Vice City. Update to the newest, properly uninstalling them each time. Then try older drives. If that doesn't do anything, it's clearly not the problem.

This could also be hardware problems... An inadequate PSU or heat problems might only occur if GTA Vice City pushes your system the most.

[Spongebob]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

Graphics drivers can cause these types of problems, but I've heard nothing about any batch of Catalysts have problems with GTA Vice City. Update to the newest, properly uninstalling them each time. Then try older drives. If that doesn't do anything, it's clearly not the problem.

This could also be hardware problems... An inadequate PSU or heat problems might only occur if GTA Vice City pushes your system the most.

The reason I reformatted in the first place was becuase I thought a Windows file was damaged, my graphics started pixeling and locking up the system. I tried a different ATI Radeon video card from a different system but the same kept on happening so I eliminated the video card as the problem. I switched from my faithfull 400 watt Soyo PSU to an Antec 420 Watt Truepower PSU and found that my Soyo had become unstable all of a sudden, the new Antec unit is what I'm using now and the old problems are gone. I hated to see the Soyo unit with the fancy voltage guages on a seperate front panel go down only after a years time:(.
I checked all my fans and all of them are working, the CPU temp is well within a safe zone as its always been. I know heat can cuase problems but this thing is about as well vented as they get, lots of fans, top back and sides. An AC vent is near to the system and sometimes your feet will get cold when its on, heat is not the problem and nothings overclocked. I guess changing back to the old driver would be the best thing to do right now as I stated but the new drivers seem faster on other games so I think I'll wait a few days for ATI's new driver release this month before I go back to August's version, then see what happens.

[Spongebob]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

After reformatting about 10 fricking times and getting restarts while installing Win Xp and still not figuring out the problem.:( I dicided to flash back the bios as a last attempt before scraping my mainboard. I found out the new 2.4 bios update for my board was the cause of the restarts. I went back to version 2.3 and now it seems fine.

[sLim ShaDy]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

Maybe it's because your computer isnt good enough to run it :p

[Eron]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

Well well.. I am having the same issue..


With an MSI NEO2 865G based mainboard, and an ATI 9600 Pro..

If I turn off automatic reboot on system error in windows xp, it won't reboot, but simpy crash to a blue screen. Some other programs are doing this as well. Namely, Tony Hawk Underground 2, and Hitman 2.

Is there anymore information on this?!?

[joedemagio]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

I have Vice City on my computer and am having troubles also. It refuses to let me change the resolution to anything higher than 640*480.

[Yawgm0th]

Re: GTA ViceCity making my P.C. restart.

The two of you would have to start your own threads and list specifications if you want help... The problems could be totally unrelated so it'd be beset to have different threads.