XP continuously restarting?

I have five systems in the shop right now that will not boot to XP. Three are XP Home & 2 are XP Pro. All are valid legal copies. It boots to the black screen with the green status bar below, but then just shuts down and restarts. I've been able to fix a few through the recovery console (chkdsk), but not these other 5. Just wondering if this could be cause by the user not activating their copy? If so, how can I activate it without being able to boot? Thank in advance for any help.

PS--I can't boot in safe mode either.

I don't know if that is the problem, but if you reset the time of in the CMOS it would probably be a good clue...

usually, an unactivated installation will take you to a screen that asks if you want to activate windows, and give you the options to do so..though if it gets that far, the only option that will work will be the telephone option. If you choose no at that point, it will just shut down.

have ya tried fixboot and fixmbr?

I had a strange one that was similar. It kept saying unable to find operating system but if I left the xp cd in the drive while it booted off the hard drive it would go in. Go figure. I ended up using the trusty 98 boot disk and ran fdisk /mbr. Boots fine now.

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Originally posted by Sandman72
have ya tried fixboot and fixmbr?

I had a strange one that was similar. It kept saying unable to find operating system but if I left the xp cd in the drive while it booted off the hard drive it would go in. Go figure. I ended up using the trusty 98 boot disk and ran fdisk /mbr. Boots fine now.

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That is fine if you are using fat32 - but if its an NTFS drive you just lost access to the lot and would require a full scale recovery program to get it back.

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, but two of them turned out to be bad hard drives (having a senior moment by not checking that first). Two more turned out to be illegal copies of XP and the fifth I'm working on again now. By the way, Noo, they are NTFS so the fdisk /mbr is out of the question. Thanks again for the help, though.

ACPI can also wreak havok during install on some machines. You can try disabling it, but the OS usually enables it during install and discovery. One option during install, is to hit F7 when it asks you to hit F6 if you need to load custom drivers. This causes windows to bypass ACPI alltogether and can get you through otherwise an impossible loop during or right after install.

Just my 3 cents

Dave:thumbs:

I found this, so i don't want any credit for it.

My thanks to superman who contributed the following info in a post to our Forums... "Win XP and Win 2000 have a default setting to restart at just about any error. It makes things difficult to analyze when it blows through and restarts the computer. Settings / Control Panel / System / Advanced / Startup and Recovery / Settings. Make sure the box is UNCHECKED where it says "Automatically Restart" under System Failure."
:D steve

I still have one machine doing this, but it is not during the install, this PC has been up and running for approx. 3 months. I can't boot into safe mode, I can only get to recovery console.

I've tried chkdsk, fixmbr, and fixboot (it is FAT file system). Can't find anything about it in Google or Microsoft Support.



:confused: :confused: :confused:

Thanks again for any help. Enjoy.

[QUOTE=pinhead]I still have one machine doing this, but it is not during the install, this PC has been up and running for approx. 3 months. I can't boot into safe mode, I can only get to recovery console.

You may have already thought of this but I have to ask anyway, Is the power supply big enough? If you are not getting enough power it may cause the system to shut down and restart.

Another avenue to try is set the bios to failsafe defaults and see if things improvem also try swapping out memory with a known good stick

And checking the processor temperature.