This is strange… I woke up today as usual and turned on my computer (Gateway desktop, Windows XP, Service Pack 2), but when it got to the Welcome screen it rebooted itself. I watched it repeat this a couple of times, then I tried to enter Safe Mode. No dice. It looks like it’s going to work, and then it reboots itself again.
I tried using my 3 recovery discs and did a “non-destructive” install, or something like that, and nothing seemed to happen (i.e. it’s still rebooting itself). The thing is, I could easily just do a System Restore to an earlier date and get rid of whatever I apparently got when I shut it off last night, but I can’t even get into Windows in order to do that.
Does anybody have any suggestions about how I can at least get into System Restore (or any other suggestions)? Thanks!
That sounds a little bit like something that happened to my Dell laptop a little while ago. It turned out to be a hardware problem - defective RAM - when I had it looked at. (Though mine wasn’t acting up quite as regularly as yours sounds like it is.)
If that’s it, then system restore wouldn’t work, and neither would a complete reinstall. What fixed mine was somebody physically opening up the unit and putting in two new sticks of memory, for which I had to pay.
Try going into BIOS and resetting the whole thing to defaults. You can usually access it during a brief period at the start of boot up by pressing F8, F2, or delete (depends on the system).
I fixed someone’s computer last night with a similar problem by poking around the BIOS. They just get screwed up sometimes.
I had a machine come through a couple months back doing this that turned out to be a mobo problem. Tried everything, repartition, reinstall, latest BIOS, new ram (the original tested fine).
New motherboard and a fresh install…worked like a charm.
As pointed out, bad hardware such as flaky RAM can cause this sort of behavior. But, before you spend money on replacing parts, you ought to try opening up the case (with the power off, naturally) and pull out each and every expansion card, data cable and RAM stick one by one and reseat it, being sure it fits onto the header or in the socket fully and tightly. Only do one part at a time, so that you don’t mix things up. Do the same with any external connections, too, like the video cable and the keyboard and mouse cables. Once you’re sure everything is firmly in place, go ahead and try booting up. If that doesn’t, it’s time to start looking at other options. Have you tried booting from a Windows CD or other recovery disk? Do you see any error messages on the screen just before it reboots? If you see what might be a system message of some sort, but don’t have time to read it before it restarts, try hitting the Pause key as soon as you see it.
My wife has this happen on occasion to her computer. The cause, according to Microsoft in our case, is a bad device driver. (Well, a flaky one anyway, since this only happens intermittently)
When I get some time at home, I’m gonna have to do some detective work.
In your case, though, it looks like the machine is never getting to the point where you even get an error message before it reboots, so this is probably not your problem.
Hitting the pause key on time is sometimes near impossible.
Try hitting F8 as the comp loads. When you enter the boot up menu, disable rebooting after an error (Or something to that effect, it’s one of the options you’ll have) and then continue booting. If there is an error message, it should show. Let us know what it says.
This could be caused by anything really, corrupted system files, hardrive failure, power supply failure, some other hardware failure, we need more info.
Thanks for the responses so far. When I did what Kinthalis suggested, and turned off the “reboot after failure” option, sure enough it did give me a message.
It said: “Stop: C000021A (Fatal system error). The Windows Logon Process system process terminated unexpectedly with a status of 0Xc 0000005 (0x00000000 0x00000000). The system has been shut down.”
Dear God, please tell me this sounds worse than it is.
Btw, Kinthalis I live in Jersey City too… worse comes to worst maybe I can pay you to take a look at it…
I had a client computer that did this. It turned outto be overheating, and the BIOS had an automatic shutdown at a certain temp. Going in the BIOS, and rasing this temp by a few degrees solved it, and I also cleaned out the case (it had a quite a bit of dust). You could try that, its easy enough to do, doesn’t involve unplugging things so its hard to get confused.
Actually, you may be onto something here… I just pulled the CPU from under the desk and turned it around, and it kind of does smell like something is… well, not quite “burning”, but like that’s where the smell is headed. If this is the case, is it really safe to just raise the maximum temperature? Isn’t it a certain temperature for a reason?
Before you go fiddling with BIOS temperature settings, take a look at your processor heatsink fan. Is it seated on tightly? Is the fan or heatsink fins clogged with dirt or debris? If you have a small civilization of dusbunnies well on their way to developing space travel, you might want to blow it out thoroughly with compressed dust spray. If overheating is the issue, and it could be, this is the first place to look.
You can probably skip the BIOS if you’re not comfortable with that.
Just open up the case and see if your CPU fan is spinning. And that it’s not covered with crud.
If it’s covered with crud, use some compressed air on it. If it’s not spinning, either your fan power cable came loose (unlikely) or your fan just went out.
CPU Fans, power supplies, and Hard drives. Most common components to go out.
I would make sure its clean, first and foremost. Busy some compressed air and go to town. In my experience, the BIOS had 3 temp settings that you could put it to, or you could manually enter one. The computer that had this problem was on the lowest temp setting, I bumped it to the middle one. Problem was solved, and it was in no way dangerous to the computer as all 3 were well within the limit.
An update, for those interested: It definitely wasn’t overheating. I just had a guy come take a look at it, and he was repairing Windows XP and came across the fact that there are two user accounts set up: one for my and my wife, and one under “Administrator”. Well, I told him with certainty that I never set up an Administrator account that required a password, because we didn’t want to have to use a password every day when we turned on the computer. We just wanted to turn it on and go, so it “automatically logs in” when we turn the computer on.
But he told me that without that password there’s not a lot he can do! Because he can’t get in there to change anything or repair Windows. He said it was a possibility that someone basically broke into my computer and set an Administrator password to keep me out of it!
So he had to leave and now I’m still with a non-working computer, but with the fear that I may have been violated (I feel so dirty). I’m trying to look around for ways to bypass the password, and I’ve tried every password I can think of that we would have used, in case I’m remembering incorrectly (but the computer is only 15 months old and I do remember not using one).
All XP systems have an administrator account. That doesn’t mean that is the only account with administrator privileges though. Your regular account may very well have it as well and that is all that matters.
Why is he worried about accounts if the thing won’t even boot anyway?
Stay very far away from this Mr. Computer Guy in the future. He sounds incompetent as a best case scenario.
There are ways to get around a Windows password but we are not allowed to discuss them here. Search for Windows password recovery or something.
sigh Okay, Shagnasty, you’re absolutely right. After he left I attempted to run my Windows XP disc, then the Recovery Console. At the prompt for the administrator password, I just hit enter (on the suggestion of a website I found) and sure enough it bypassed it.
So, as if I haven’t posted enough to my own thread already, the issue seems to currently be: Now what? I’m in the Recovery Console successfully, and I tried “fixmbr” (again, from a suggestion I found online) but that didn’t seem to do anything. Is there a specific command in the Recovery Console that would make my computer start up again, as normal??