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Menzo
12-02-2003, 09:27 AM
So just today the brand-new computer I built started doing something strange.

It'll boot into the WinXP (home) logo but then stop, then completely reboot the machine. It gets caught in this loop. I can't even get it to go into safe mode because apparently whatever is causing the machine to reboot happens before it gets through loading into safe mode.

I tried re-installing WinXP, but the WinXP boot disk gets caught in the "inspecting drive0 yada yada yada" line when I either select repair or install.

The drive is a Seagate 160GB SATA drive. It has worked fine until today.

It could have gone bad, but is there some way I can fdisk it or inspect it to find out?
Jason McMaster
12-02-2003, 09:29 AM
Do you have an older copy of windows or even dos? some of the older copies, if I'm not mistaken, have executables for diagnosing hard disks. If not, most hard disk manufacturers have utils to check their own products. Go to the seagate site and look around. You can then make a boot disk and load the exe on it and run that when it hits a prompt.
Tyrion Lannister
12-02-2003, 09:56 AM
This started happening for me when I installed the latest NVidia ata drivers - I'm having a devil of a time trying to remove the buggers too.
Saxman_72
12-02-2003, 10:21 AM
Very often I've worked on computers with the same problem as you're describing, and the culprit was often RAM.
Murph
12-02-2003, 10:26 AM
Yep, bad RAM, bad CPU, and bad motherboard all frequently have this as a symptom. Been there -- it sucks. Sorry to hear that.
Desslock
12-02-2003, 10:29 AM
It'll boot into the WinXP (home) logo but then stop, then completely reboot the machine. It gets caught in this loop.

It's either bad RAM, or a problem with your boot volume. It's actually a feature of XP to automatically reboot if your files are at risk because of a boot volume error (do you even get a blue screen error message for a fraction of a second?). If not, probably RAM.
Menzo
12-02-2003, 11:56 AM
I used the Seagate utils and reformatted and re-installed. Everything seems to work fine now.

Stupid that WinXP can't detect a reboot cycle and at least report a Very Big Problem(TM) to the user.