CD ROM Drive

Well, with any "strange" behavior, my first recommendation is to update your virus scanner and check for a virus.

Aside from that, I suspect a bad CD drive that is loading down the power supply. The sudden drop in voltage is triggering a reset signal on the motherboard.

The solution is either a new power supply, or CD-ROM drive.

Chas

well, i could imagine an interrupt conflict doing this, couldn't it?
this an ide cdrom? what cd's do this? audio, game?
this is weird one so i also think: eliminate possiblity of virus. what is your virus protection status. if you are less than scrupuluous about up to date scanning and such i would start by downloading stinger.exe from www.mcafee.com onto floppy. carry to your box. boot box in safe mode and run stinger from floppy. while in safe mode, see if opening cd drawer, placing cd, closing drawer gives you the reboot (pick a cd that gave you reboot before :>)(you won't have the cd drive appearing in My computer in safe mode, but you can open and close the drawer). if you get reboot, go with Chas and try new cd drive. or power supply, chas?
i would boot normally and look in device manager (conrol panel/system) for yellow bangs or question marks. especially on my cd rom drive.
otherwise i would look for software problem. anything else weird happening with this system? this happens with any cd, yes? like try your ms win98 installation cd...
you could open box and look at cables, make sure everything is plugged in, sniff for hot/burned electronics smell.... what has changed last couple days? add any hardware or software. remove any?

I've had this - bad power supply.

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