Continuous Reboots

[Guest]

I've tried everything - No luck. Here is my problem:
When I boot XP pro (SP2 on a Athlon 2500XP/Asus A7N8X Delux) , the POST
passes fine, then the XP progress bar scrolls on the bottom of the screen,
the computer reboots back to the POST and repeats. I have tried each of the
startup options multiple times, Safe, Safe with Networking, VGA mode, Logged
etc. No help.

I've tried it all,
1) cleared CMOS and restored values to known good ones. Removed addon cards,
extra memory, reseated everything, swapped PSU's, Keyboards, mice,
disconnected extra CD drives, extra HDs.
2) "Repair" installed XP (4 times) using original XP Pro CD.
3) Installed XP on a new HD (in place of cuurent HD). Started fine (This was
to ensure all other hardware and MB/Ram etc was OK). Then I switched HD's
back.
4) Used Recovery Console to read a boot log (NTBTLOG.txt) to see is obvious
problems existed. Nothing real obvious, except for some "Not loaded" messages
(could that be a problem?)

Of curious note, my problem started out not quite so bad. The logon screen
used to come up fine, the mouse would move around fine and let me select my
name. As soon as I touched my keyboard the screen would freeze. Being
industrious, I used Remote desktop to connect to my PC from a second XP
machine, I was able to get logged on alright, but within a minute, the
connection would break and my "dead" PC would be locked up. I saw a AW_HOST
error message flash on the screen (apparently from PCAnywhere that I have
loaded). I used Recovery Console to "disable" apparent offenders that I felt
were not needed such as the items that started aw_, in my attempt to remove
PCAnywhere services.


Any help?

If I do a "fresh install" over the current install, will the apps and
documents remain?

 

[M]

You could try using the recovery console commands
Fixboot: Writes a new partition boot sector onto the system partition.
Fixmbr: Repairs the master boot record of the partition boot sector.
see
http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058/EN-US/

 

[Gerry Cornell]

Henry

Have you ran a full anti-virus scan with up to date definitions?


--


Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
FCA

Using invalid email address

Stourport, Worcs, England
Enquire, plan and execute.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Please tell the newsgroup how any
suggested solution worked for you.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

[JK]

I had this problem. My machine just kept cycling and rebooting. I rebooted
and used a Western Digital diagnostics disk to check the condition of the
hard drive. The physical hard drive checked out and when the system
rebooted it actually got to the point where the OS did a disk check and some
file system errors were corrected. The system continued to reboot without
any problems. After that my pc has booted normally. Could be your file
system has errors and that is forcing it to continually reboot.

Jk

 

[Guest]

Taking some of the advice give did some more work:
1) Using the new XP HD I just created, I installed Norton Antivirus (with
full updates)and scanned my non-booting HD. All was clean.
2) I then made a Ghost Image of the HD so if I screw the HD up, I can
restore the image to the HD and try something else.
3) I did a full check disk of my non-booting HD. All ok.

Tonight I will remove the "good" HD, and use the recovery console to fixboot
and fixmbr the non-booting HD. I'm no expert, but it seems that with the
white scrolling bar at the bottom of the screen, the drive has already
booted. It sure seems like a driver (or bad service??). Just a note, when I
"Repair" installed XP, it booted fine from the HD during the installation
process (mid way after the initial cd to HD copying was complete). It was
only after the installation completed that it resumed the boot failure.

I also tried to start up using the "logged" option, after it crashed, I went
into the recovery console, but I could not find the ntbtlog.txt file with the
boot log. Anyone know where it should be. I thought it would be in the root
(C:\windows) dir. I deleted an old log there a couple days ago. With this
log file missing, does that provide at what stage of the boot sequence my PC
is failing?

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

Henry

 

[Guest]

I gave up.

I went ahead and did a fresh OS install. I also had to reinstall EVERYTHING.
All my data is fine however. Now the issue is all the PROGRAM FILES folders
are still there, and have caused issues with newly installed programs. I
decided not to reinstall some programs, such as Abobe Acrobat, but some of
the "links" with MS Office must have survived the fresh installs. I have had
to go in and manually delete some folders etc. Not done yet but soon.

Thanks for the help alyway.

Henry