Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Computer keeps booting

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Posted by Richard May (Member # 2627) on 04-27-2009, 09:48 PM:

I suck with computers so maybe this is an easy fix for everyone out there. I have a Gateway desktop. My son was playing with it the other day and now all it does is basically try to boot up and reset and boot again. It never finishes though. I get the screen that says "Window shut down unexpectedly........." then it gives the choice of continuing in safe mode.......last known config that worked.........and all that. No matter what mode I try, It just keeps resetting. Any help would be greatly appreciated......Thanks.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-27-2009, 10:46 PM:

This problem sounds similar to what one of my friends is going through with an old Dell Dimension desktop. In my friend's case, I think that PC may be infected with some sort of virus. That's because it started doing all the not booting into Windows BSOD nonsense immediately after he tried downloading some kind of business software off Limewire. "I warned you about those file sharing places." Oh well.

There's two simple solutions I can offer:

1. If there is no data on the hard drive that will be missed, format it. Erase everything and install Windows over again clean.

2. Remove the hard drive from the desktop PC, install it into an external hard disc enclosure. Attach it to a different computer with all the latest updates to Windows and a good anti-virus/security application. Run a virus scan on the attached drive. Then back up any valuable data off that hard disc. And then consider doing what I said in option #1. Or at least defragment it.

Online sites like Newegg and Tiger Direct sell external hard drive enclosures that will accommodate 3.5" and 2.5" drives, as well as support old IDE drives and newer SATA hard discs. An old SCSI drive may be more difficult to save.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 04-27-2009, 10:59 PM:

I'm with Bobby. It's either a virus, a crunched OS or, likely, a little of both.

As much as there are programs that promise to remove viruses and repair crunched systems, you can never be sure your system is 100% unless you erase and reinstall from scratch.

Like Bobby says, extract all your "stuff" from the HD, either by booting from the system "rescue" disk or by removing the drive and attaching it to another machine. Copy all your stuff to another computer or an external drive. Wipe and reinstall.

Yes, it's a pain in the ass. Yes, you might be able to nurse the computer back to health without going through all that. But, if you don't, you are essentially sitting on a ticking time bomb, waiting for something to go wrong again.

Take the time to do a thorough job and you will be able to breathe easier knowing your computer runs the way you expect it to with no surprises.

Posted by Adam Martin (Member # 641) on 04-27-2009, 11:38 PM:

Try booting up with the Windows install CD and choose to repair the installation.

Since you can't boot in safe mode, you may have to boot up with the Windows install CD and choose a new install. If you have to do a new install, there's a possibility you will lose your My Documents files.

Posted by Jennifer Pan (Member # 2035) on 04-28-2009, 01:47 AM:

If you have anything in the CD/DVD remove that and manually turn off and then turn on the computer. I have had this issue before and from what I recall that should do the trick. In any case choosing the "last known config that worked" after taking the CD/DVD out.

Posted by Rick Raskin (Member # 1561) on 04-28-2009, 02:56 PM:

I helped a friend last week with the same symptoms. His occurred just after getting some software update (?) that required a restart. It died. We had to reload Windows with the format option because the repair function didn't fix the problem. The good news is Windows XP doesn't go through a zillion updates anymore. One update and then straight to SP3. If your on Vista, I haven't a clue on updates. Good advice given above to try and recover your data before you wipe the drive. Good luck.

Posted by Barry Floyd (Member # 385) on 04-28-2009, 03:57 PM:

My computer at the drive-in has/had the exact same symptoms. It would just constantly reboot over and over, never actually making it to the desktop.

I took the hard drive out, put it in an external shell and hooked it up to my computer here at the office. Once I hooked it up to my office PC, it would just reboot the office PC over and over. I even tried resetting the jumper on the rear of the drive from master to slave and still got nothing.

Posted by Greg Anderson (Member # 235) on 04-28-2009, 04:31 PM:

Same thing happened to a friend's office computer. It was a 4 year-old Dell which was receiving automatic updates from Microsoft. He came in one morning and it was doing the endless boot cycles. We managed to start it in "safe mode" and run a "System Restore" to take it back about a week. This seems to have cleared up the problem but we WILL NOT run automatic updates on that machine anymore.

Posted by Joe Tommassello (Member # 4632) on 04-28-2009, 04:34 PM:

Lots of good advice. This is my area of expertise now.

Try to boot up in Safe Mode with Networking. You would get to the boot options by pressing F8 at the very beginning of the boot process. If you can't do that try Adam's suggestion of booting to the Windows OS disc and selecting the repair option. If it's still dead you may need to follow Bobby's suggestion and have the drive scanned by removing it and attaching it to another computer.

In any case once you get it up and running be sure to install an up-to-date anti-virus program. Another excellent application that I highly recommend (and you can try it for free) is Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Download it at:

Malwarebytes Site

Install it and update it and run a full scan and delete anything it finds. And for Pete's sake keep your kid off of the file sharing sites!

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 04-28-2009, 07:29 PM:

Since you can't get it to boot in safe mode, you could try booting a cdrom that's got some anti-virus software.

And one such cd from is available at http://www.ubcd4win.com/
It's got AVG Free, AVPersonal, Avast, Kaspersky VRT, and McAfee Stinger. And it's also got a few anti-spyware softwares as well.

Though it's possible for constant rebooting to be a hardware problem, but one wouldn't expect it to get as far in the process as you've described if it were.

Posted by Richard May (Member # 2627) on 04-28-2009, 10:06 PM:

Thanks everyone. I tried Jen's idea. No good. Tried booting from the Windows XP cd. I Get as far as the repair option. When I select repair, it starts going through some things and just stops. I was thinking about booting from an AV cd.

Posted by Bobby Henderson (Member # 840) on 04-29-2009, 09:31 AM:

In the case of my friend's computer system, his system was indeed infected with a number of trojans, several of which infected vital files in the Windows directory. It turns out he didn't have up to date anti-virus software on his old desktop computer.

What's scary is if one of the trojans he picked up didn't screw up a certain .DLL file in the Windows folder he would never have known his PC was infected. Then the criminals behind those viruses could steal his personal data, record keystrokes or at least make his computer vomit out loads of spam or work in an army of infected computers for denial of service attacks. Many computer viruses try to not call attention to themselves.

We discovered the infections by using the previously described method of placing the computer's hard disc into an external enclosure and attaching to another PC via USB cable. McAfee found 14 infections in all, but could only clean half a dozen of them. The others had irreversibly changed files in the Windows folder -at least they're quarantined while the drive is attached to his notebook computer. I told him to back up important data off the hard disc and then format it. He's stuck with having to do a clean install of Windows and everything else.

Posted by Randy Stankey (Member # 64) on 04-29-2009, 01:35 PM:

Several years ago, the hard drive in my iBook thrashed itself to death. It was nearly 5 years old and saw daily use. The drive was bound to fail sooner or later. When it did, the computer was totally out of commission. I couldn't even boot from a CD.

The only solution was to replace the drive. I didn't have the money to replace the drive so I just tossed the thing into the closet. There it sat for years.

Finally... I came upon somebody who had the same kind of computer as mine. They busted the screen off it. Everything else inside was okay. So I bought the guy some beers in trade for his trashed computer.

You guys talking about crashed hard drives spurred me into getting off my ass and doing the surgery to transplant the hard drive from the busted computer into my iBook. The computer works perfectly!

Given that experience, I am inclined to believe that your hard drive is completely trashed and that a drive transplant is in order. I'm not certain that is the problem with yours but it's not too difficult to do the drive transplant on a tower.

It took me a couple of hours to disassemble the iBook and put it all back together again. It wasn't easy but it was a lot less difficult than I expected.

If yours is a reasonably modern tower computer, you should be able to to the job in 20 minutes or less.

Hard drives are cheap. If you've got one lying around or if you've got another computer you don't use the drive will be free.

Look at it this way: Your computer is completely out of commission as it is. You have little to lose and much to gain.

Posted by Andy Muirhead (Member # 712) on 04-29-2009, 08:42 PM:

Assuming your running XP; You need to stop it resetting to find out what the error is, normal behaviour in XP is to reset on a crash and start again. You have to change the settings in the bios to not restart on a crash.

Once you have done this, next time you boot up, it will give an error message (the blue sceen) instead of restarting. Write down this error message and search google with the message. This will at least let you know what the problem is, and possible fixes.

Posted by Richard May (Member # 2627) on 05-04-2009, 09:30 AM:

Okay so this is what happened.......I boot from Antivirus CD after trying all other suggestions from here and elswhere. It starts to run but the screen looks really weird (strange colors and a bit distorted). It runs through and finds no viruses. So I say "shit", it must be the hard drive crapped out or something. I try to boot from Window XP cd again, but it totally freezes this time. I take the cd out, pull out the plug, plug it back in again, start it up and here we go again. I get to the "Windows did not start successfully.......blah, blah, blah,,,," so I say fuck it, go inside and eat dinner. I come back after dinner and notice that my screensaver is up. I touch the mouse and everything is back to normal. First thing I do is back everything up that I need. I then shut down the computer and restart it. Everything is working fine and nothing was lost or damaged. I have no idea what the hell happened...........Thanks for everyone's help.

Posted by Julio Roberto (Member # 4976) on 05-04-2009, 09:47 AM:

With those symptoms it may anything, including a bad or loose "anything" [Razz]

: power supply, hard drive, video card or, a bit more likely, bad or loose RAM.

Doesn't seem to be a case of simple corrupted windows or bad driver, as those don't really fix themselves so easily and it took you some trouble and effort to run even the antivirus and winxp boots even from CD's (freezes).

It points to the possibility of flaky hardware.

In any case, for the future, you may want to look into free antivirus solution from avast (read PCMAG reviews if you want to know more about it):

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

and also free anti-spyware solution spyware-doctor. You can get it for free from http://pack.google.com (uncheck all the stuff you don't want and leave spyware doctor).

Good luck and don't forget to back up [Wink]

Posted by Richard May (Member # 2627) on 05-04-2009, 10:52 AM:

Thanks Julio. I'll check it out.

Posted by Joe Tommassello (Member # 4632) on 05-04-2009, 12:47 PM:

Also get the excellent free MALWAREBYTES program.

www.malwarebytes.org