Pc in reboot cycle, bsod flashes.

[riddellcomp]

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?

[BOB IROC]

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.

[riddellcomp]

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.

[NooNoo]

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

[Matridom]

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.