Windows XP Home in rebooting loop

[jakkwb]

Hello -

I have an HP Pavilion with WinXP Home. It is in a rebooting loop. It will not start in any mode without restarting. I have tried 2x repair installs, but it still does the same thing.

Any suggestions?

[BOB IROC]

If you hit F8 to get to the Safemode options screen is one of the options "disable automatic restart on system failure" If so maybe it will get to an error screen that will help us.

This could also be caused by spyware/viruses or hardware problems such as bad memory or hard drive.

Sometimes HPs have built in diagnostics you can run and thats were I would start. Test your hadware and if all passes you may have no choice but to do a complete system reformat/restore.

[jakkwb]

That option is not there in the boot up options list. The whole reason I tried a repair install was that the entire desktop had disappeared. All that was on it was the background. The only thing I could do was Ctrl-Alt-Del to try to do anything. After the repair install is when this started.

[BOB IROC]

Sounds like you got some Windows Corruption going on that may be related to Spyware or malware. I hope you have your essential data backed up because in case such as this I would recommend doing a complete system restore/reformat.

[Ferrit]

Were you able to get to the desktop the first time after these repair installs?

[slgrieb]

I'm curious to see jakk's response to Ferrit's post, but I'd speculate that doing a full restore (one that reformats the hard drive) is the only practical way to get the computer running again. I see this so often, and after the fact, it's hard to say if the problem was malware related, caused by ill behaved software, or whatever. But I'm pretty certain that even after a single failed repair installation. Windows is completely fried. If the culprit were bad memory or the like, the repair would have been likely to generate errors.

[Ferrit]

I was wondering because I have seen this out of a few odd manufacture ati based video cards. Changeing the video card fixed the issue

[jakkwb]

No, the desktop didn't show up. That is curious that you mentioned the vid card. It stalls out and reboots on a agp related file - I will post which one.

Maybe something there....The video is onboard. Not sure which one. Will post that also...

[slgrieb]

jakkwb, the startup screen displays the last driver successfully loaded, so a hangup after that means that the next driver in the sequence crapped out. Admittedly, this makes troubleshooting boot issues harder than it needs to be, but sometimes a search may provide a clue.

Edit: Ferrit got me to thinking that problems with chipset drivers can also be a source of crashes. Still, I'm going with the "Nuke It" recommendation. Even if you don't have a current backup, you have a good chance of recovering your data without major expense, but let's worry about that if the time comes.