The continually-booting computer

Friend has come to me with a computer problem. His computer was getting to the windows splashscreen and then rebooting. On trying to enter windos through the command prompt, he got a blue screen of death, VFAT error. Soooo...he tried to reformat his computer...didn't work. When the computer goes to reboot during the installation of windows, it hits that splash screen and reboots...and reboots...and reboots...and...well, you get the picture. Since that didn't work, he cleard the BIOS (with the jumper on the m-board)...tried reinstalling windows, same thing. This is where I come in...he wants me to figure out what needs to be done to it. I'm no longer concerned about losing data on the HDD (since he reformatted it already). Noticed that the power supply is doing wierd things. When the computer is off, the light on the FDD remains on sometimes, the hard drive seems to run a little loud at times. I wasn't able to determine what speed processor he's running, but it is a pentium-class socket 7 processor with 64 (I think) MB of ram and he's trying to run Win98SE (same OS it's been running since he purchased it in '99). He told me that he replaced the power supply just about 6-8 months ago. I tried putting another HDD in his computer to see if it would work (I've got an extra 6.4 GB)...no luck. If you can offer any suggestions as to what he (or rather I) should do, I'd greatly appreciate it. If there's any other information you need, lemme know and I'll see what I can get. Thanks for your help! :confused:

sounds like it's getting some off the wall voltages try throwing a spare power supply in it also what kind of comp is it and what kind of power supply

The computer is a 'Proteva' and I'm not sure who made the power supply (it's ATX). That was kinda my feeling when I turned the thing off and the lights on the drives stayed on. We're notoriously bad for getting power drops and spikes around here too, although he does have a pretty decent surge protector on it (perhaps he got a power surge through the CAT5 line?) I'm also wondering what the chances are that some of the other hardware was damaged by some wierd electrical pattern going through the machine. In that case, what would you think the most likely thing to go would be?

Had that happen about a year ago turned out to be a bad NIC in an Aptiva, the surge didn't blow any other components just the nic for some reason.

I would concentrate on the power supply, and also check to make sure the reset switch is plugged in on the board where it should be. :rolleyes: They say that Stars are born every day....so are Computer Virusis...

Also I once had a Banshee video card which caused the system to continually boot, and the problem was fixed by flashing the chip on the card. :p [QUOTE]

i have seen this b4 as well it was the processor fan was not moving so it was shutting down b4 it over heated i would check to see if the fan is moving on processor or not

I've had this happen too. . .it was on a celery. What happened was the slot 1 adapter had some soft solder points. . .once i put a new chip in all was well. . .its its a slot one adapter card. .check that

Hello,
I had this problem as well on an old S7 system I made for a friends brother, it turned out to be the CD Rom drive (creative 24 speed I think) that caused the system to keep rebooting when shut down, replaced the CD Rom and life was rosey - don't ask me why it worked - it just did!!!

does the computer goes through the memory recount??if it does then your psu is faulty.!!!