BleepingComputer.com: Looping reboot, no bluescreen

I'm a technician for a helpdesk at a small university. Apparently a lab computer wasn't booting to windows one day, so a professor dropped it off. The computer is going through a looping reboot, but the confounding thing is that there is no bluescreen. I ran memtest and found a failed stick of ram. I replaced it with a new stick, ran memtest again, and came up without any errors. Just for good measure, I also ran spinrite, which also came up clean. It now sits, mocking me, looping through a cycle where the windows loading screen comes up, the bar starts to go across below the logo, and it reboots before it even has the chance to bluescreen.

I have no way of knowing the recent activity of the computer, so I don't know if anything was installed, if someone kicked it across the desk, or anything that could give any indication as to why this is happening.

Technical stuff:
Windows XP Professional Corporate SP3
AcerPower FH (APFH-EP9250P)
Pentium D CPU (Not sure which one specifically)
2 GB DDR2 RAM
160 GB HDD

It sounds like the automatically reboot check box was left enabled for a start up error. It should still be creating an error in event viewer, if you could see that, but will not hold on the blue screen. Have you tried to boot into either safe mode or Last good?

Since you have multiple computers available...I suggest removing the hard drive and running the chkdsk /r command on it.

You might also want to run the appropriate hard drive manufacturer's diagnostic on it.

I would also do a search for any .dmp files on that system. If there are any, move them to the other system's folder (after temporarily moving the ones which belong there) and then you can run BlueScreenView to get data from the .dmp files.

Louis

If you can get into the bios you need to disable the "reboot on system failure option". Get the error code from the bluescreen and check it on a number of different computers. if you think that it might be a memory problem download "windows memory diagnostic" (a great memcheck program). Other than that, just keep troubleshooting starting from power working your way up to the proc. Hope this helps.

Ok, this is odd. Yesterday before I left for the night, I took the drive out, put it in an external bay and scanned it for malware on another computer. I just put the drive back in and the computer boots to windows no problem.

Reboot on failure was disabled. That's what was really confusing me. There truly was no bluescreen. I went hunting all over the drive for any .dmp's, nothing. It was just rebooting before it even had the chance to bluescreen. Oh well.

I don't trust it. It's been acting a little too weird for my taste. But it works, so I guess that's what matters.

The rebooting may be related to heat or hardware...you might check it for cleanliness, overheating possibilities, run a hard drive diagnostic.

Bootable Hard Drive Diagnostics - Vox - http://usasma.vox.com/library/post/bootabl...iagnostics.html

Cleaning the Interior of your PC - http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/cleaning-the-inside-of-your-pc/

How to Avoid Overheating Hardware Secrets - http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/142

Louis

This post has been edited by hamluis: 02 September 2010 - 08:59 AM
Reason for edit: Added links.