Having Major Issues, auto restarts, corrupted files...help!

[everglade]

I've been having issues with my computer for a few months now and after reading some of the posts I'm thinking my power supply could be the culprit. However, I'd like some advice as to other things I should be checking before I throw more money out for new hardware.

My specs are as follows:

P4 1.7ghz
ECS Elitegroup motherboard
512MB PC2100 DDR
CD-RW
DVD-ROM
Internal USB/Firewire hub
Floppy
ATI Rage Fury Pro AGP card
2HD one 40G (Win XP installed) and one 20G
350 Watt Power supply


About 2 months ago, my computer started having these strange, random restarts. Sometimes it would restart right after I login, while I'm trying to install something or sometimes...just because. Most commonly though, it would restart right after I login to the computer.

Then one day, after a Norton Antivirus live update, it did another random restart only this time, I couldn't get back into Windows. I'd get the welcome screen, but no user icons so there was no way for me to login. Safe mode was the same. I did a reinstall of XP at this point.

The random restarts continued and then after an automatic XP update...the registry errors began. Everytime I logged into XP, I'd get a message saying the registry had to be recovered from a backup. Then it started getting really strange as certain programs sometimes werent' recognized and though I was connected to the home network, the network was no longer visible in My Network places. I decided to do a reformat and reinstall XP yet again.

XP installed fine but in the middle of restoring other programs, the computer powers down and sparks start flying out of my power supply. Scared the daylights out of me. I had the cover open because I was about to have a wireless network card isntalled. I replaced the power supply. The new one has the same wattage power as the old.

My problems got worse. The random restarts continued but now I had trouble installing Oracle and other programs. In Oracle, no matter what I tried, I'd get "error writing to file" messages. After installing a few other programs, I got the registry errors again.

I thought maybe the power supply messed up that drive so I unplugged it and installed XP on my 20G drive in the hopes that it would solve my problems. The random restarts no longer occur, but I still have trouble with Oracle giving me write errors and now I keep getting corrupted file messages from XP. It constantly wants me to run chkdsk and it keeps finding corrupt indexes and orphaned files.

Do I need a bigger power supply? I noticed those random restarts stopped after unplugging the 40G drive from the system. Or is it just that both drives are bad from the shorted power supply? Are there other things I should be checking?

[brad]

It could be that the Power Supply damaged the other drive or maybe even other hardware.
Can you try the drive in another computer to eliminate it as the culprit?
I know that bad Ram can cause Registry errors. Can you get another stick of the same type to try?
What is the exact error message you get?
brad