I just reformatted the hard drive on my computer, and started reinstalling windows 98. Everything went surprisingly well untill Windows was supposed to run for the first time. A message appeared that it had found a plug and play device (my monitor) and was searching for software to install it. Then it restarted. Thinking that it had installed the software, I sat patiently for it to reboot. However upon booting up the same message appeared, and it once again restarted all on its own, again, and again, and again, at which time I shut it off and came in search of answers Any thoughts on why this is happening or how to stop it?
If it helps it is an AMD processor, and the monitor is from Gateway. It never had this problem before though.
I had a problem like that (restart, restart, restart) once and it turned out to be a faulty power cord. :smack:
But since yours appeared upon the reinstall of your OS, it’s probably not that (don’t hurt to check, though). It’s unusual to hang on the detection of your monitor; that’s always been routine in my experience.
This is interesting. I’ll be waiting for some more knowledgeable folks to check in.
Does it always happen during monitor detection or does it happen randomly during install? I had problems with my computer randomly rebooting during the install process and it turned out I had a bad RAM chip. Download DocMem, a free memory tester to check.
Problems like this could happen if your computer is overheating. Make sure your fans and heatsink are properly connected.
Also, you might just have a corrupted Windows install. Try reformatting and trying again from scratch.
I’m sure there are plenty of other possibilities that I haven’t thought of, as well. Good luck.
Urban Ranger: That’s what I would lilke to do, but its not being kind enough to ask me to restart it just “decides” to on its own.
Hodge: Ill try the RAM tester later, casue right now I’m re-re-formatting the hard drive etc.
Sailor: I did get it to run in safe mode but the problem is I’m not allowed to install hardware in safe mode (and besides my CD-Rom drives are not yet available to me through windows). I tried to trouble shoot but its kind of an odd problem to look for help on. But I have a felling that something does need to be done through safe mode, so if any one knows some computer voo-doo let me know.
Like I said I’m reformatting and installing everything again. (Maybe if I punch the keys a whole lot harder this time the computer will know I mean business) This time I’ll try to see if I can install the drivers from DOS. Wish me luck.
I had spontaneous restarts before too, becasue I had onboard audio, and a sound blaster too. I forgot to disable the onboard, and so they conflicted, rebooted, and crashed frequently…
Check for sonflicting devices.
Triping - Try booting into safe mode and change the video adapter driver to Standard VGA. Monitor detection happens through the video card and it could be that Windows has installed some funky driver that your video card pukes on when a monitor hardware query is made (or it could be that the refresh rate is way off). If you can then boot into Normal mode and it doesn’t restart, get out your video drivers disk or download the latest from the manufacturer and install it. Hopefully your problems will disappear.
You might want to open your case and make sure all the cards and RAM are seated properly. Maybe take them all out, blow on them to get all dust off, and reseat them. After that, I’d suspect bad ram or overheating.
It doesn’t sound like he opened it up. Major possibility-- since it has happened to me too, was that he didn’t turn off the boot sector & virus protection schemes in the Bios. So the install couldn’t create a new boot sector for w98, result? a loop.