Ghost in the machine...

[adrianbargen]

I built a PC for my wife a few years back.  It frequently boots up randomly.  Several times a day.  I turned off every feature in the BIOS I could come up with over a couple years.  Decided the motherboard had some weird issue.  She now has a new boot drive, motherboard, chassis, CPU cooler, mouse, keyboard, headset, GPU, and bluetooth adapter.  It has had windows reinstalled at least half a dozen times.  AND IT STILL DOES IT.  Could it be the power supply?  Everything else is new...except the CPU and maybe one of the larger mechanical drives.

[An0maly_76]

Can you clarify what you actually mean by "frequently boots up randomly"? Do you mean it is turning on by itself? System specs could help a lot also. Foregoing that, my best guess is this could be a short in the power switch, or some sort of worm that forces remote start / power-on.

[adrianbargen]

10 hours ago, An0maly_76 said:

Can you clarify what you actually mean by "frequently boots up randomly"? Do you mean it is turning on by itself? System specs could help a lot also. Foregoing that, my best guess is this could be a short in the power switch, or some sort of worm that forces remote start / power-on.

We shut it down.  We will be watching tv or something on the other side of the room.  It turns on and boots up.  Sometimes 5x a day.  Somedays it doesn't do it at all.  I'm not entirely sure how much the specs matter, but it is an i7 4790 with a corsair power supply... probably a 750 watt.  It does have an RX 480 graphics card, but that wasn't the one it had when it started.  Motherboard is an itx from gigabyte, but  I put it in less than a month ago when I crammed it in a pink round ugly case my wife liked so it wasn't the one it had when this started either.  It originally had an nvme 500gb boot drive, but I had to change that when I changed the board to a 480gb sata ssd.  It has a couple 1tb HDD.  The ONLY original components are the CPU and the PSU.  I've actually posted in forums a few times over the couple years it's had this issue.  Nobody has been able to tell me anything useful.  I have literally 4 other machines I have built sitting around the house from various ages that have never had this issue.  And...I'm also not entirely sure that it is the original power supply..she had an older pc that had an antec 450 in it...I can't remember if it was in there when the issue started or if I had pulled the one out of one of my small miners for it.

[An0maly_76]

I would say first carefully recheck your PWR / RST / front panel header wiring, as this is a common mistake. Could be a strand of hair or something else conductive got pinched up in the connectors when they were installed.

 

Ditto on the ATX, particularly in the green-to-black on the side which has the retaining clip, or, as mentioned previously, a worn / faulty power switch. The only other logical conclusion would be some sort of similar situation internally in the PSU in regard to its internal relay, or as also mentioned previously, some sort of worm / malware effecting some sort of remote access.

 

Carefully go through any installed software and any processes running, and ferret out their source / manufacturer and whether you know for sure they can be trusted. I've heard of miners distributing worms that make others' GPUs mine for them, though I'm not sure if they're sophisticated enough to incorporate remote access and power-on.

Edited July 10, 2022 by An0maly_76
Revised, more info

[Motifator]

Ghost in the machine eh? Sounds bit more of a complicated issue than whiskey in the jar.

It could be a malware indeed. Rootkits have been doing this for decades now. Would recommend grabbing Malwarebytes and running a scan. You mentioned that you re-installed Windows couple times, but if you have a vulnerability somewhere else, such as in the modem... you might be getting infected when you connect to the Internet.

[Heliian]

Unplug the front panel power connector.  

 

It's most likely a shitty power button or wiring.  If it still does it, clean the pc, rerack components.  If that doesn't work, get a new mobo. 

[adrianbargen]

2 hours ago, Heliian said:

Unplug the front panel power connector.  

 

It's most likely a shitty power button or wiring.  If it still does it, clean the pc, rerack components.  If that doesn't work, get a new mobo. 

It would mean the last two cases or the last two motherboards were both bad. I'm actually asking here because I just rebuilt her pc into a different case that required itx board.  I was 100% sure the problem was going to go away after all that.  Origional setup was an nzxt case with an asrock board.  now its some cheap shit china case and a gigabyte board.

[adrianbargen]

3 hours ago, Motifator said:

Ghost in the machine eh? Sounds bit more of a complicated issue than whiskey in the jar.

It could be a malware indeed. Rootkits have been doing this for decades now. Would recommend grabbing Malwarebytes and running a scan. You mentioned that you re-installed Windows couple times, but if you have a vulnerability somewhere else, such as in the modem... you might be getting infected when you connect to the Internet.

More than a couple times.  And that was some of the first things I've tried.  I've disconnected everything from the machine and the thing still pops on in the middle of the night.  It's on the third boot drive at this point.  Second motherboard and second case.  I always thought it was the motherboard just having some hicup with wake on LAN in the bios or some shit.  It's the only one of the 4 machines in the house that has ever had issues.  I wish I had an extra power supply, because as I was writing everything out, I could see how it might actually be the issue.

[adrianbargen]

3 hours ago, An0maly_76 said:

I would say first carefully recheck your PWR / RST / front panel header wiring, as this is a common mistake. Could be a strand of hair or something else conductive got pinched up in the connectors when they were installed.

 

Ditto on the ATX, particularly in the green-to-black on the side which has the retaining clip, or, as mentioned previously, a worn / faulty power switch. The only other logical conclusion would be some sort of similar situation internally in the PSU in regard to its internal relay, or as also mentioned previously, some sort of worm / malware effecting some sort of remote access.

 

Carefully go through any installed software and any processes running, and ferret out their source / manufacturer and whether you know for sure they can be trusted. I've heard of miners distributing worms that make others' GPUs mine for them, though I'm not sure if they're sophisticated enough to incorporate remote access and power-on.

I think I'm actually going to pull a power supply out of one of my other builds and see if that fixes it.  My daughter has a similar build, I might just start swapping things until her machine is the one that starts doing it.

[An0maly_76]

Just now, adrianbargen said:

I think I'm actually going to pull a power supply out of one of my other builds and see if that fixes it.  My daughter has a similar build, I might just start swapping things until her machine is the one that starts doing it.

That would definitely tell the tale. Sometimes that's the only way to really figure out the source of the problem. Unfortunately, not everyone has a spare machine or components at their disposal.

[Beerzerker]

23 hours ago, adrianbargen said:

I built a PC for my wife a few years back.  It frequently boots up randomly.  Several times a day.  I turned off every feature in the BIOS I could come up with over a couple years.  Decided the motherboard had some weird issue.  She now has a new boot drive, motherboard, chassis, CPU cooler, mouse, keyboard, headset, GPU, and bluetooth adapter.  It has had windows reinstalled at least half a dozen times.  AND IT STILL DOES IT.  Could it be the power supply?  Everything else is new...except the CPU and maybe one of the larger mechanical drives.

I have to assume you disabled all the "Wake on" events in the BIOS like wake on LAN, wake on mouse and such right?

I've had my mouse (Laser) sometimes twitch the cursor while I'm not touching it. If you have a wake event enabled in the BIOS and while sitting, the mouse on it's own detects a movement it will start the machine.
The actual surface it's sitting on if it's a laser mouse can sometimes induce a false movement reading due to color and/or the texture of it, also if it's a varied color pattern instead of a solid color that can do it too because the mouse is always looking to see if anything it's seeing changes.
If the mouse still has power to it while the machine is "Off" it can detect and register this "Movement" resulting in system startup.

Go into the BIOS under "Power management" and disable ALL "Wake on" events, if the mouse is detecting false movement that will stop it from starting the machine on it's own.