Comp. keeps rebooting right after POST

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mestizo122

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I haven't had much time to actually look at it but the computer has been giving my parents a lot of problems. Right now the computer is dual booting into Windows ME and XP (I know that ME is not ideal, but it is needed for an old DOS database program that will not work in XP).

Anyway for the most part the computer stays in XP except for the few times a month that the database needs to be looked at. For the past week to 2 weeks, the computer has been rather slow. They have been getting errors in IE and AOL sometimes corrupting files, sometimes run time errors. The computer will start to lag, and be slow. The few times I have worked on it I haven't heard anything unusual with the HDD. I have not heard any weird clicking nor any other kind of noises.

The occassional reboot (which used to be <1 min) started to take longer and longer in Windows XP (but was fine when booting into ME). It now gets stuck in a continous reboot cycle. It reboots at random times prior to the "OS selection" screen. Sometimes it is right after I turn it on, sometimes it is after verifing the DMI Pool, and sometimes I get to the OS selection screen, and it will go a few seconds before restarting.

I am not sure if it is the PSU, because if it was wouldn't it randomly restart even in Windows? If it was the HDD, I would be hearing noises, which I haven't yet. Is there anything else that it could be?

Thanks for your help.
 
It could be the PSU, harddrive, motherboard or ram. Have you tryed hooking up another hdd to see if it will boot? Have you tryed to boot from the XP cd? It sounds like the master boot record is corrupt.

Before messing around with the MBR you should hook the hdd to another system (as slave!!) and back up your data then boot from the xp cd and go into repair console and type FIXMBR to see if that does it.
 
I haven't had a chance to swap anything else yet. I am going to try to boot from a CD and see if it reboots any during then. If it is the RAM, PSU or mobo it would restart if I was to boot into BartPE or Knoppix (live Linux CD), correct?

Also would it be better if I were to use an external enclosure to backup my data or to actually boot from it and use a slave drive? I need to make sure that I am able to retrive some important data off of it. I am leaning towards using the enclosure since it won't boot all of the time.

Thanks for your help.
 
Just for future reference, there are DOS emulators that run in windows XP that will allow you to run dos programs. DOSBOX is probably the best one there is, that way you can avoid having to dual boot.
 
Thanks for the DOSBOX suggestion, at the time I thought it would be easier for them just to restart the computer to use the program, that way it got restart every once in a while. They generally like to leave it on.

I have been working on the computer since I got home from work, and started to take parts from an older computer. I think that it was a mixture of a couple of things.

I cleaned the inside of the case of all the dust that was in it, reseated the RAM, and unplugged everything but the HDD. It got a lot futher then it normally did (it got to where Windows starts to load) before it restarted again.

I was able to pull a PSU off of another computer that is not being used at this time. The PSU is what was making it reboot constantly. Funny that the 7 yr old psu is still alive and working wonderfully, while the 1 year old psu is dead.

The PSU did not solve the slowness and overall lagginess of the computer. I have not found any signs of a virus, and the virus scanner is up to date. I have even ran another scanner on it. I think that I am going to end up reformatting it, and hope that the hdd does not have to be replaced.


Thanks for all of your help.
 
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