Comp reboots while it boots.

[altwight]

My friends computer back in december would restart whenever it reached the "Windows XP" loading screen. After that it would load up fine. However recently it's gotten a bit out of hand. It takes anywhere from 1-20minutes of constant rebooting for it to fully boot up. Please note it's just restarting on its on whenever it reaches the XP loading screen. When it does indeed load, it seems to be running fine.

Anyone got any sort of ideas on this? He was thinking it's a hard drive problem and maybe if he reformatted it would fix.'


edit: he's got windows XP pro installed (torrented) and has a windows home edition cd. I'm not sure if running the repair option on the home edition would be a smart thing to do with pro installed.

[Blubbartron]

My money's on bad RAM. Get him to run memtest86+ and tell us how many errors pop up.

[altwight]

to run that you download the ISO burn to a disc and boot from disc?

[Blubbartron]

Yeah, though I'd recommend googling Ultimate Boot CD and using that, memtest86+ is on it, as well as dozens of other handy dos-based diagnostic tools.

[Shuemue]

Yeah, though I'd recommend googling Ultimate Boot CD and using that, memtest86+ is on it, as well as dozens of other handy dos-based diagnostic tools.

I love UBCD, Ultimate Boot CD - Overview

[Spekkio]

UBCD or it's on most ubuntu disks. you can use it both as a memtest disk and a rescue disk to get data off an unbootable drive before you do what you need to in order to fix the PC.

also, try booting to safe mode. if it makes it to that reliably, that narrows down the problem space dramatically.

[Gippo]

might not be bad ram. registry might have gotten corrupted(bad os). Slave the drive and look for system volume information directory. Try to find a snapshot of before the event. Copy Sam, Security, Software, System and Default to windows\system32\config directory with no extensions.

reboot and see if it works.

you can also verify a corrupt os by booting to safe mode like the above poster said, or by inserting an xp installation cd and proceeding with instructions until it searches for previous versions of windows on the drive.

[kisada]

i've had (still have) this issue for a while.

friend of mine worked on the computer, and basically determined that it was mistakenly booting into one of my storage drives. sometimes it'd load fine, other times yeah it'd take a while to get to that point. eventually it got so bad that it permanently switched to the storage drive as the boot option. what you can do to test it out is to just disconnect any extraneous drives and see how successful your boot rate is at that point. if it's 100%, then you'll know what the problem is and can handle it from there.

[Shuemue]

i've had (still have) this issue for a while.

friend of mine worked on the computer, and basically determined that it was mistakenly booting into one of my storage drives. sometimes it'd load fine, other times yeah it'd take a while to get to that point. eventually it got so bad that it permanently switched to the storage drive as the boot option. what you can do to test it out is to just disconnect any extraneous drives and see how successful your boot rate is at that point. if it's 100%, then you'll know what the problem is and can handle it from there.

Have you tried updating your BIOS, or even replacing your BIOS battery?

[Khamsin]

I half expected an xzibit joke in here, somewhere...

[Tormentormike]

I half expected an xzibit joke in here, somewhere...

Fuckin exactly what I was thinking...

yo dawg, i heard your pc reboots, so we put a reboot in your boot, so you can reboot while you reboot.

[Xfaustx]

Fuckin exactly what I was thinking...

yo dawg, i heard your pc reboots, so we put a reboot in your boot, so you can reboot while you reboot.

DAMNIT I WAS JUST ABOUT TO TYPE THAT. i was checking this thread to see if that comment had already been made ._.;; fail.

[Olo401]

might not be bad ram. registry might have gotten corrupted(bad os). Slave the drive and look for system volume information directory. Try to find a snapshot of before the event. Copy Sam, Security, Software, System and Default to windows\system32\config directory with no extensions.

reboot and see if it works.

you can also verify a corrupt os by booting to safe mode like the above poster said, or by inserting an xp installation cd and proceeding with instructions until it searches for previous versions of windows on the drive.

This is what I was gonna say... It's hard to tell if it's bad memory or a problem with the OS loader at this point.

Have you tried booting to safe mode at all? Try going that route, using the step-by-step confirmation if available. If it's something in the OS loader you'll get stopped & rebooted at the same point every time. If it jumps around from process to process then there's a good chance it's something like bad memory or maybe even bad sectors on your hard drive.

[#686578]

You might want to check out just some chipcreep. A friend of mine had this same problem and after running some tests I just went in to test each stick by itself to manually see if any sticks were bad and after I tested them all, and everything was fine he never had a problem again.

Chalked it up to chip creep and that because they were properly reinstalled he had no more problems.

[Bardicrune]

The most common thing I've seen present this way is bad/leaking capacitors on the motherboard. My company has had about 400 PC's present this very issue and it was due to a bad batch of capacitors that were used on PC motherboards. You can read up on the problem here: Badcaps.net - Badcaps Home

[sruon]

Check CPU °F, my friend comp would restart over, and over, and over, because CPU wasn't well put onto the motherboard, and it would show over 200° in the bios.