I was wondering if anyone could help me out with a problem I have been experiencing. I can't seem to boot my machine anymore, or basically get windows to load. My machine will just reboot itself out of the blue, before I can even get windows to load. I attempted to reload the operating system but failed to do so because of the boot issue. Does anyone have any thoughts where to check of the top of their head? I don't know if I got some kind of virus, or my MB is going $%^& up...

Any help would be greatly appreciated.
TP

I guess it would help to let everyone know what I am working on. Its an AMD Duron, running Win ME, 128 megs of ram, and I believe a 20 gig HD. Phoenix I believe is the BIOS, and I'm pretty sure my MB is a biostar...yeah yeah I know that may be part of the problem ;)

Have you tried booting into safe mode?? and running a system restore?

I haven't tried that just yet. I have had it in safe mode and tried firing up my virus scan....but same problem, it never got finished before it rebooted itself.

While your there in safe mode what is your power management set on? turn it all to NEVER see if that will stop it. temporarilly.shut off all screen savers and anything you have running in the background EXCEPT systray, Explore,StateMgr,

Make sure all your fans are running, especially the CPU and power supply. Had something similar happen to my wife's computer, and it turned out to be the CPU fan's power lead had come unplugged.

I'll double check, but I am pretty sure that I can hear my fans running. Its really getting frustrating though....as anything does I guess.

It may be worthwhile to boot from a Windoze Startup boot disk and run Scandisk. This would be to check and see if you have a hard drive problem, but it would also show whether this is a Windoze or a hardware problem. If you can run Scandisk from DOS, it suggests that you have a Windoze problem, if you can't it is probably hardware. You can download a bootdisk at www.bootdisk.com if you don't already have one, usually the Win98 is best.

Rebooting at startup can also be caused by a bad power supply module, CPU, or MB.

Win ME

The fatal words that make the whole thing a different kettle of fish....The worst Windoze ever created in my opinion.

I had a similar problem before with a hard disk- The hard disk kept rebooting every machine I put it into. It was a new one in stock where I work and it got put in 4 new PCs all with XP, 2000 and Linux installed and it did this on each machine. So the hard disk could be the problem. Try pulling out all IDE and floppy cables and just leave in the hard disk cable, see if that makes a difference- Safe mode too- check device manager and see if everything is there and running. Ultimatly a re-install of a new and BETTER OS would sort it no probs.

I think its ME that is the problem.

Try one stick of RAM at a time

The problem with rebooting has haunted many systems, it isn't always related to what operating system you are using, although it can.

Possible problems might be hardware conflicts, software related, power supply problems. The way you solve it is by systematically testing differant configurations until you don't experience any more problems. Easiest being reinstalling operating system, removing hardware wich is redundant while you troubleshoot. And then if you have the possibility to test with differant psu, ram, cpu. By doing this, you will eventually discover at least what unit/program/os is causing your spesific problems, knowing _exactly_ what happened should not be the goal here.

This is based on my actual experience, and I have always been able to solve these types of issues, by following my routine described over. Some of the problems I solved turned out to be among others, defective power supply wich we replaced with a brand new, no problems experienced with that specific system after this. Replacing the RAM chip on another system, resolved the rebooting issue all together, this RAM chip a 512 MB DDR 333mhz actually turned out to work ok on another system. It is actually the RAM chip I am using now while writing this post.

Conclusion:
There is no definite answer to you problem, the way you do it is by working your way trough it, systematically. One/some of the tips in this thread might turn out to be your solution, who knows..

Good luck!