Bad HDD Causing Random Shutdowns?

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southpole_89

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Pentium 4 Prescott 3.0 Hyperthreading
GeForce 6200 256mb
1.2 gb ram (gig, 256) ddr 400
Dynex 5.1 Soundcard
Rosewill 550 Watt PSU Dual 12v rails 120 mm fan
Windows XP Home Edition SP2 (fully updated)
Western Digital 115gb IDE HDD (2002 old)
BioStar P4M80-M4 Motherboard

For a couple years I was using an Apevia 450 watt psu that came with a case I bought. It worked great and then my computer started randomly crashing and the psu was making weird buzzing sounds. So now I bought a 550 watt Rosewill and I've been using it since the 24th of last month. Mind you I had to reformat because the previous power failures corrupted my hard drive. So everything has been going fine. I usually play counter-strike 1.6, and I can get up to around 250 frames per second which isn't bad for my specs. Now, a couple days ago my brother was playing Ultima Online and the computer restarted improperly and corrupted one of the user profiles. That was fine as I know how to take care of that. But last night it did it again. This time my computer was saying that a driver file isapnp.sys file was missing and it couldn't load windows. I was trying to repair windows using the disk and it kept asking for the administrative password which I didnt even have a password on it. I kept restarting, and eventually it didnt even tell me isapnp.sys was missing/corrupt. It would start to load windows, then blue screen and restart. So I reinstalled windows. Everything is updated once again and it hasnt shut off yet. But we havent been playing Ultima Online.

Is it possible that a bad Hard Drive can cause restarts like this? If my power supply was bad you'd think it would shut down when I play a game like counter-strike. Mind you after I got the new power supply I had to reformat, and when I did it kept getting stuck at 75 percent (formating). So I set the partition to a smaller size so it would skip that part (thinking that might do the trick) and it worked. I sacrificed my space to get it to format 100%. That tells you right there that atleast some part of my hard drive is messed up. I'm thinking the random restarts from my old psu just screwed my hdd altogether. I don't want to consider it being my power supply because I just bought it and its been running fine for a week straight. And it would keep shutting off if my cpu was overheating. which I have a thermaltake copper heatsink and fan, and Arctic Silver 5.

SO it's only shut off 2 times in 2 days. ONLY when Ultima Online is running. Maybe just a coincidence. (I can play it for hours, and nothing happens though)
 
!UPDATE!

I switched power supplies and figured out that was indeed the problem. I can't believe a brand new rosewill psu would turn out to be defective. RMAing immediately.

(I know now that I don't have to reformat to be able to boot. You just have to remake your boot.ini and rebuild your os list from Recovery console(XP DISK) (in most cases, without hdd being totally corrupt). I also know that if you don't have an administrative password and recovery console asks for one anyhow, just enter it blank, just a bug i guess.)
 
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