Do I Have To Reformat?

[SnowFox]

Last night my computer was working great. I shut down my computer normally. I turn it on and it goes and start loading into Windows XP (Home Edition) and it will all of a sudden flash a blue screen with some white text on it and restart back to the motherboard screen before it loads the OS and the same thing happens over and over again. Eventually my BIOS reset and it still happens. My BIOS has this thing called Xpress Recovery, now it would load my previous BIOS options back if I had saved them, but instead I think it like reformatts my HD. It said all storage on the Hard Drive will be lost, continue? And I said no. Is there anything I can do? I am pretty sure there is no CMOS Jumper and it auto set itself back to default anyway. I have a GIGABYTE GA-K8N PRO-SLI Motherboard. It does not start up in safe mode either. Is there something in my BIOS I could change or do i have to reformat?

 

[Law]

You know what the message on the BSoD was?

 

[SnowFox]

no it flashes it really quick and then restarts the comp. someone told me i can set it not to do that but i do not see that option in my bios.

 

[Law]

Are you able to press F8 and boot into safemode? Then you can go to System > Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery > Uncheck "Automatically restart"

 

[SnowFox]

When it asks me if I want to boot windows normally or safe mode or the other options none of them work including safe mode

 

[Law]

OK. Lets remove any hardware we don't need from your computer. Leave just the core 4 components, the CPU,RAM,VID card, Hard Drive. In BIOS if you have build in soundcard and NIC make sure to disable them.

 

[SnowFox]

No sound card. Other than those compenants I just have a disk drive and some case fans I think. Oh, and the CPU cooler. My motherboard has built in audio. How do I disable that and why do I want to do this?

 

[SnowFox]

I go to Recover System. It says all data on Hard Drive will be lost press "R" to restore. I assume this means to reformat. I press R and it says Error and just restarts the computer. Do I have to put this thing in another computer to reformat or what!?

 

[Law]

You can disable the onboard audio in the BIOS intergrated peripheral section. Disable unnecessary hardware is a good way to diagnose the problem, making it easier to isolate the problem. Thereby you can focus just on the main component that you have running, just incase a hardware might be the cause of the problem, you can determine that if the problem goes away when the hardware was removed.

That recovery thing from the XP CD won't do crap to help you, I have seen and heard many people try to use that with no chance of success.

I forgot how to freeze the screen to read the BSoD, but I think it's somewhere when you press F8, I don't know as of now but maybe someone who do can help us here with this. I wanted to see what the BSoD message was just to see if we can look it up. It would make it a bit easier to track the problem.

 

[SnowFox]

eh, I reformatted and it works.