Pc in reboot cycle, bsod flashes.

Hello,

Ive just looked at a friends pc which seems to be in a constant reboot loop. A BSOD flashes for a milli-second or two after the XP splash screen and it reboots again. I tried rebooting to safe mode but it just locked up, and the same when trying last known good config.

She said that she ran Nortons which found a problem and fixed it and then after trying to restart thats when the problems began.

I thought that maybe Nortons had caused the problem but then wouldnt it at least boot into safe mode? The fact that it doesnt makes me think its a hardware problem.

So any ideas as to what I can try. Will a repair install wipe any data? if not maybe I should just do that and see if it fixes it or not. If not I suppose I could remove all unecassary hardware and see what that does?

It is possible that she had an infection and when she scanned it deleted or corrupted a system file or two that was infected.

A repair install should not destroy any data, but it may revert some settings back to defaults.

It could also be a hardware problem and be pure coincidence it happened after she scanned. Do you have any diagnostic software to test things like the ram or hard disks? If so I suggest running those.

I use Hirens Boot CD found here http://homepage.ntlworld.com/hiren.thanki/bootcd.html

It has all sorts of useful utilities.

I thought that if it were a system file problem it would at least start in Safe mode. I agree that it may be just coincidence and it is in fact a hardware fault. Thanks for the link to Hirens Boot cd. Will give that a try.

Depends on the system file that got deleted....or it could be Norton itself... some viruses will retaliate by screwing up the av completely.

Personally, I'm interested in what thats blue screen error is. When the computer starts up, press "f8" to get into the advanced start-up menu. You will see an option here called "Disable automatic restart on system failure", select it. This will prevent your computer from auto-rebooting when the blue screen occurs and will give you the necessary time to read the error message.