PC in a rebooting loop?

[Colin Brett]

A friend has just called to ask what's causing his PC to reboot continually? It boots as far as the desktop icons beginning to appear and then reboots itself to the same place and then reboots etc etc.

 

Any ideas??

 

Colin

[Newt]

Best initial guess is a power supply that is going bad. Handles things fine until it is under full load and then gives up.

 

It could be other hardware (possible) or an OS (operating system) issue (possible) but your friend should hope for a power supply problem.

 

Needs a computer shop to check it or possibly just buy a replacement and see how it goes.

 

If the PC power supply was only just barely large enough to begin with and the owner has added stuff, it would only take a little loss of capacity to cause this.

[Colin Brett]

Best initial guess is a power supply that is going bad. Handles things fine until it is under full load and then gives up.

 

It could be other hardware (possible) or an OS (operating system) issue (possible) but your friend should hope for a power supply problem.

 

Needs a computer shop to check it or possibly just buy a replacement and see how it goes.

 

If the PC power supply was only just barely large enough to begin with and the owner has added stuff, it would only take a little loss of capacity to cause this.

Thanks Newt,

 

I sorted this PC out once before, would you believe it was a power lead causing the probs. I used one of my leads and could find nothing wrong. When friend takes it home and plugs in his lead, it won't boot.

He thought that might be the problem this time, but it's not.

It boots to Safe mode OK so at least he has a backup of everything.

I'll try a power supply.

 

Thanks again,

 

Colin

[Newt]

It boots to Safe mode OK

 

Less stuff drawing power then so it certainly could be the PS. If that does not fix things, post back with the OS (if XP, home or pro and what service pack) so we can try a little file repair work.

[Andy_1984]

OS related. i once had it happen, i had an illegal copy of windows xp which i tried to crack, it went wrong and just kept rebooting. you never installed anything that goes deeply into windows system files ?

[Colin Brett]

OS related. i once had it happen, i had an illegal copy of windows xp which i tried to crack, it went wrong and just kept rebooting. you never installed anything that goes deeply into windows system files ?

Somehow, don't ask me how, he's got it going!!! Hooray!! :clap2:

 

It seems he managed to get System restore into the equation, but didn't actually run it?????????????????????????????

 

Windows [XP] then said it was repairing corrupted files, which it did. It then deleted some suspect files as well??

 

Don't ask as Eddie [friend] doesn't know how it all came together either!!

 

Thanks for all your suggestions and help,

 

Colin

[billy50000]

Hi all

 

good for him but when i had this prob it was because my video card drivers were off par and all was ok untill the pc got to the desktop and it rebooted.

its something to do with the system trying to start up full spec video systems as i believe it runs on minimal untill desktop.(or something like that)if it happens again try installing board and video drivers first.

 

may work and its worth ago

 

sg