Computer restarting automaticly

[Skie]

Ok friends computer is having troubles. He turns it on it gets windows loading bar (xp, before he logs into his computer) then it goes to blue screen crashes, and restarts. Any ideas?

[Isiolia]

It's probably a hardware or driver problem. Did he make any changes to the machine before this started happening?

Try hitting F8 to get the boot menu and try Safe Mode or Last Known-Good Configuration options. May also want to check and make sure RAM and such is seated.

[Skie]

He was on the internet and it was working fine, then it froze and he had to hard reset and now it does it. Tryed safe mode and last known good configuration both do the same thing, it wont even get to safe mode desktop.

[sruon]

Check CPU temps in Bios

[Isiolia]

It's probably a corrupted driver due to the forced shutdown (or because the HDD has bad sectors). Can you get it to run a checkdisk or similar?

[Skie]

He tried the CPU temps it was 60 and 39. Will try scandisk in a few.

[OWS_Tonx]

Sounding like a bad HDD

[Isiolia]

Sounding like a bad HDD

Aye, or suddenly bad RAM (I've had it happen). However, I've also seen similar issues resolved by running checkdisk - drive isn't necessarily bad, the filesystem might have just gotten corrupt due to forced restart.

[OWS_Tonx]

similar issues resolved by running checkdisk.

Yeah hopefully. It's an easy fix either way

[Skie]

He can't get to the desktop, how do you run it before start up? It rstarts when windows is loading

[Pikarya]

Check motherboard for fat caps around the processor.

[Isiolia]

He can't get to the desktop, how do you run it before start up? It rstarts when windows is loading

If the recovery console is installed, then you may be able to get to it from the F8 boot screen. Otherwise, boot from a Windows CD or pull the drive and hook it up to another machine to scan it.

[Skie]

tried running the recovery disk last night, cant even do that. Keeps restarting.

[Crowort]

If it is restarting while running the recovery disk it could still be the hdd thou less likely.

You are going to have too start with basics and work out which component is causing the issue.

I'd try running a basic setup 1st. 1 stick of ram (if he has more than 1 stick you'll need to try this with each stick being the '1' stick) CPU, and video card (if he doesn't have onboard video only).

The easiest way to test the HDD is to remove it and install it on a known working system. Running diskscan from another windows install.

It is also advisable to download and burn memtest (tests memory). You need to run it a good long time preferably over night to find or rule out bad ram. When using memtest you'll want to change boot order too cd/dvd 1st so it will boot the disc.

Can't really be more specific since you can't at the moment give us much more detail about the problem.