Continious rebooting

[Thort]

Hi!

I have a two years old Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo Xi 2529 Desktop computer.

Motherboard: MSI "MS-7350VP".
Operating system: Windows 7 64bit

About a month ago the motherboard onboard LAN controller stopped working. I had to buy a PCI network card to get Internet access.

Some days ago, suddenly, the computer rebooted Windows by itself. Then, later on, Windows freezed.

Now the computer is rebooting continuously. BIOS finds my two harddrives and my two CD-drives. When the bootup comes to the moment when it's going to access the startsector of the harddrive the prompt stays blinking for a while. Then the computer reboots.

I changed the start order in BIOS in order to boot from the CD-drive. I inserted my Windows install CD. The computer boot process halts making a question if I want to start from the CD drive. I hit a key to confirm. Then, a never ending veritcal row of H-letters appear. I have to hit the reset button to end the loop.

I would appreciate if someone could give me a hint about what's causing this.

 

[MindoverMaster]

Welcome to TF!

There is something wrong with one of your drives. Try disconnecting one by one and see if it works.

Next I would blame yoour PSU. What wattage do you have? Also, I need your full specs.

 

[Thort]

Thanks MindoverMaster. I do appreciate your help!

I disconnected first my first cd-drive. Then my second. And then my slave harddrive. It didn't help. The computer continued to reboot. When I finally disconnected my master harddrive the boot process stopped with a message saying: "Reboot ans Select proper Boot device or Insert Boot Media in selected Boot device and press a key".

I connected the cd-drives again and inserted my Windows installation cd. Now, no message appeared, but a vertical row of H-letters.

The wattage of my PSU is 500 watts.

Here is the specification of my computer:

 

[MindoverMaster]

I don't read Swedish, but I got the gist.

That no boot error just simply means you have no bootable drive, or your bootable drive has no OS on it.

For the multiple H's, I am unsure. Try your other cd-drive. The one must be reading the disk wrong.

Your OS drive may be bad. Try a Linux boot-disk, Ubuntu or others, to see if you can read it and/or get data off it.

 

[Thort]

Hi again!

I have tried both of my cd-drives. None of them is able to start neither the Windows installation cd nor the Linux Ubuntu 10.04 installation cd. Interesting to note is that when the cd-drives try to start the Linux cd, they read and displays the first line of text from the cd on the screen. Then, immediately, the computer reboots. Both of my cd-drives behaves the same way.

Furthermore, the bootup process should stop with a question if I would like to start the computer from the cd-drive. This message doesn't appear.

I can't figure out what's wrong.

 

[MindoverMaster]

For the "if I would like to start the computer from the cd-drive", you need to put your Cd-rom as first boot.

 

[Thort]

I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 Live CD on an USB stick. This stick is bootable on my other computer. But when trying to boot with the stick on the my broken computer it reads from the stick, but only shortly displays the first text line of the Ubuntu startup procedure on the screen. Then the computer immediately reboots. Just the same behavior as when trying to boot from the two cd-drives.

This is the situation:

- I can't boot from my master harddrive. The computer doesn't seem to read from the disc.

- I can't boot from any of my two cd-drives. The computer reads shortly from the cd, then reboots the machine.

- I can't boot from an USB stick. The computer reads shortly from the stick, then reboots the machine.​

Why does the computer behave this way? Is the situation hopeless?

 

[MindoverMaster]

Did you try resetting your BIOS? Either by setting it to default within CMOS or removing the battery?

 

[Thort]

Thanks MindoverMaster!

I found a button on my motherboard which resets the BIOS.

After pushing it I got this error message during startup:

CMOS Checksum bad

After that message, a new message shortly appeared:

Checking NVRAM...

But still the same rebooting.

 

[MindoverMaster]

I think your board is bad, unless anyone else has a suggestion.