XP Home - constant rebooting

My boss just came by my office with his home PC and said "fix it"! This is a HP Pavillion 750 with an AMD chip. It will not stop rebooting! It goes through the boot process and gets to the pick a user screen. Before you can get a chance to pick something - IT REBOOTS! I timd it at 90 seconds. Have tried last known good configuration, and safe mode. What can this be????

 

when you reboot it, is it still connected to the internet in any way?

 

Does not connect to anything! Does not complete the boot process.

 

have you tried running a REPAIR on the installation?

 

I have no disks at all. He only gave me the PC. None of our systems at work here run XP home. We only have 2000 Pro.

 

if you boot to safe mode, does it reboot on its own then?

 

ooh, not good. How bout yanking that drive and slapping it in a 2000 box and scanning for viruses and checking the hard-drive for errors.

 

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545

Replace your registgry and try it again.

 

When I boot to safe mode it does let me pick a user then gives me a black screen with the words "safe mode XP-Home service pack 1" at each corner of the screen. I have no icons - it does go into screen saver mode and does not reboot the PC

 

Can you press Ctrl-alt-del and get a task manager in Safe Mode?

Would be best if you could turn off automatically restart to see what the error is instead of rebooting.

This can be done even after going through http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307545

You just have to load a hive and do it manually, then put your registry back.

 

ooh.. I read it as though safe mode rebooted you as well.

 

if he has administrator rights, or is the administrator, can he can also check the Event Viewer in safe mode?

Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer

 

In case you didn't read the previous post - when I boot to safe mode I get the following


"safe mode - XP home sevice pack 1" around the corners
Black screen - no icons!

I would love to try your suggestions - If I could get that far!

 

does it give you the same thing no matter what user you login as?

 

Yes it's the same. Can't even get to Bois.

 

What do you mean?

BIOS is loaded and POST is performed before Windows even tries to load.

You have a PM in regards to the above article I posted. Its the only thing I can think of trying.

There are other options, if you werent OEM, like doing a parallel install and doing a services transplant in the registry, or even being able to turn off crash control key in the registry of the broken install.

But being OEM pretty much makes most ideas I have worthless.

 

Perhaps like they said before, throw the hard drive into the 2000 machine (slaving) and run a defrag check for viruses and everything and that should clear it up.

 

This is more a corrupted registry problem than problematic drive or virus. Though it's not out of the realm of possibility, Adryn and I believe it is unlikely. Since this is an OEM box and MS explicitly states NOT to perform the registry recovery procedure on OEM machines, I am left with nothing else but to slave the drive and get what ever data you can off the drive and start over.

 

I shall try the slave method first. If that fails I'll try Adrynalyne's suggestion. Wish me luck. This will take me some time since I am supposed to be doing my other work

 

I'm not positive Kodo, but I think the reason they say that is because OEMs change the repair hives, sorta.


C:\windows\repair\system does not exist. The OEMs name it system.bak.

So you have to rename system.bak to system before it can be used in the above article.


There may be other reasons as well. Now that i think back, registry replacements on OEM machines have a considerably lower success rate than retail (a lot of times because they can't get to the recovery console).

The MS Windows XP techs generally ignore the warnings given by MS in replacing an OEM registry. Mostly because a lot of the initial XP MS KB articles were written by incompetent pencil pushers and as such don't work right or at all

 

Seeing as I've never done a hive replacement on an OEM and only done 1 other, I lean towards following MS's suggestions for safety's sake