WinME System immediately powers off after booting

Have a very weird problem with a friend's computer. The system powers off (does not shut down, simply powers off) almost immediately after booting. Also does this in safe mode. He had a friend attempt to fix this by wiping the hard driving and restoring using the Compaq restore disk. Still happens.

It's not the power-supply -- ran a copy of Norton System Works 2003 that the friend has, had to leave partway through and the system was still powered up when I got home several hours later (no errors or problems found). Tried to boot -- powered off immediately after booting.

Finally got into the bios and started checking settings -- found these possible conflicts(?) under PCI Devices: Audio device IRQ 10; Other Communication device IRQ 3; Compaq 1394 Controller IRQ 10; USB Controller IRQ 11; USB Controller IRQ 11 (that's not a typo, it is listed twice with the same IRQ); S3 VGA Controller IRQ 3.

My friend did say he saw an error message go by once when his friend was doing something (either restoring or trying to load XP?). He didn't remember much about it except that it did say that if it wasn't fixed, the system would shutdown. I've never seen it, but it seems to be the problem I'm experiencing.

I'm suspicious about those IRQ settings, but I'm not about to change anything in the BIOS unless I'm sure of what I'm doing.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. Many many thanks in advance,

j

 

Thanks Tim. System still wouldn't stay up. I even tried unplugging the video card. I'm not sure if it stayed up or hung during scandisk (it has hung once or twice). The hard drive light never went off, but there were no disk access sounds.

I downloaded an me bootdisk from bootdisk.com. The system stays up when booted that way, but it only boots to DOS (I suppose that's normal, haven't used one in years). I also managed to finally find the bootlog.txt file (it was hidden). I didn't see any error messages. It has 921 lines, and the last four lines are:

[00153470] Enumerating Standard Floppy Disk Controller (ACPI\*PNP0700\00000001)
[00153471] Enumerated Standard Floppy Disk Controller (ACPI\*PNP0700\00000001)
[00153471] Enumerating TapeDetection (TAPECONTROLLER\TAPEDETECTION\0000)
[00153471] Enumerated TapeDetection (TAPECONTROLLER\TAPEDETECTION\0000)

I also found the following differences:

msdos.sys has a recent date -- 9/11/06 (9/11???). There is a version msdos.--- with a date of 7/22/19. The differences are 1) the older version has BootMulti=0, the newer has BootMulti=1; 2) the older has DoubleBuffer=1, the newer does not have this entry; 3) the newer has 2 addtional lines: AutoScan=1 and WinVer=4.90.3000. There is also an msdos.bak, also dated 9/11/06, with BootMulti=1, DoubleBuffer=1, AutoScan=1, WinVer=4.10.2222.

Any ideas what I can try next?

Many many thanks in advance,

jo

 

Did try doing a scanreg/restore earlier this evening (sorry, I forgot to mention that). Did not help. The most recent backups was 9/26 or 9/29. I talked to my friend on Saturday, and he said something about his friend wiping the hard disk clean, restoring from the Compaq restore CD, then trying to load XP, which didn't work, so he went back to ME. However, he was having this weird problem before his friend started playing with it. His friend did the wipe and restore process because he had seen similar behavior which was due to a virus.

My apologies if I should have mentioned the above sooner. My bad.

jo

 

Wish I knew what exactly his friend did, too. I'm wondering if I ought to just wipe the hard disk and use the compaq restore and see what happens. He said that Norton found 64 errors after running the restore disk -- i.e., when restored to the state it was shipped in. And he couldn't remember if it was running properly upon restore or not.

j

 

Just thought I'd post a thank you and say we gave up and my friend bought a new computer. I don't think he was as old as mine, but it was several years old.