shutdown and restart

Many things really you should post system specs, operating system etc.

If XP or Win2K, boot into safe mode and shut off the system auto reboot or error. There may be an initial error that is causing it to reboot instead of showing a BSOD with the error.

oh, sorry meant to put o/s but forgot. o/s is win xp no error just gets past detected ide and reboots on its own. when it does reboot it runs fine.

You can try appending "/SOS" at the end of entry in the boot.ini for the windows xp. It will show you the loading of all the drivers and how xp/2k actually boot in the background.

Test the system memory using Memtest86. It is useually the cause of 2k/xp to reboot randomly. Or even consistanly.

Another thing you might want to try is to scan for viruses using a different machine. I had a system that was doing a similar reboot when booting the system. Once I removed the 3000+ viruses and put the drive back in the machine it booted as if there was no problem before. Also check the drive for spyware using Ad-Aware or spysweeper. Just scan it in a seperate machine and only scan for files on the drive since the registry is not loaded.

Type of HDD, CPU, BIOS and mobo would be helpful.

If only does this during initial boot but not during restart, problem is likely occuring prior to Win XP loading and is BIOS related. If available, try setting a hard disk access delay in BIOS. If this is not situation, post back with more info.

First off, start your computer in safe mode. Once on safe mode, Go to the control panel and click on system properties. Click on the ADVANCED tab and click on the startup and recovery area's "settings" button. Once in there, look for the seccion that says "System Failure" and UNCHECK the "Automatically restart" option. Click on ok, and close the windows. Restart your system and record the STOP: 0x000000xx error you will receive, and post it or go to the Microsoft knowledge base and look for it.

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