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PC rebooting loop

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by estreetjerseygirl

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My friends have a PC that is caught in a rebooting loop. It's an IBM NetVista (2 yrs old) and has a Celeron processor, 128MB of RAM. Long story - Boot up the PC, it went into Windows ME. All the icons came up, and the background came up as white with that blue triangle with the exclamation point in the middle. Then it'd reboot. It didn't matter if I clicked on anything or not, it'd reboot. It was caught in a loop; the only way to stop it was to turn the computer off by the on/off button.

She hadn't installed anything new; the only thing she uses the computer for is the internet. She didn't have any files or anything on it; just the internet and her 5 year old daughter's computer games. She also had run the thorough scandisk and it didn't come up with anything. Neither did the antivirus check, which was updated with the latest definitions.

I formatted the drive, deleted the partition, then re-allocated it - set it as the primary drive and all that. Reinstalled the OS, and it was still caught in the rebooting loop, only now it wouldn't even go into Windows at all. I tried to run antivirus from bootup, but it wouldn't run. I also can't get the computer to start in safe mode.

Time for drastic measures. I zero-filled the drive, partitioned and formatted it, and installed Windows ME again. (She had wanted to go to XP, but the PC only has 128MB of RAM.) The installation went well, and it will get as far as "new hardware found" - it wants to install the driver for the printer. If I click on cancel to do it later, it reboots. If I try to install the driver, it finds the driver on the CD and then reboots. If I unplug the printer from the PC and then restart it, it still wants to install the printer driver.

My fiance had the same problem on one of his computers a while back, and said that he had run some diagnostic menu, and had to turn off almost every item, start the computer in safe mode, and turn each item on one by one to determine where the problem was.

5 replies

by chris910

the diagnostic program is MSconfig but I would be looking at the memory possibly reseating or preferably swapping it out with known good memory. If I was troubleshooting from scratch I might investigate if the proper memory is installed. I reciently found a situation where the user had upgraded the memory in their computer and they began to have intermitant problems but they tolerated them for about 6 months. It turned out that the computer had one non parity stick of memory and one parity stick causing the problem. the computer would work fine with either but both together caused problems.

by joseph moore

I would actually look for a Flash BIOS upgrade for the motherboard. See if a newer BIOS is available, and load it. See if that clears things out.

by eminent87

this sounds like a RAM problem. try swapping ram to see if it helps. if you already reformat the drive and its still looping then it can only mean 2 things, bad ram or an outdated bios. if changing the ram won't help, my next step would try to update the bios to the latest version.

by estreetjerseygirl

Thanx, everyone ... turns out it was a problem with the motherboard. The capacitors by the processor had acid on them - a problem with this model of computer - and IBM is replacing the motherboard for free.

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