I have a computer that keeps rebooting

[ptukey]

Hello

I am working on a computer that is running windows 2000 pro. When I boot up to windows it works for a short period of time. I would say about 10-15 min and then (even if nothing is running) it reboots. Now the machine left alone after each reboot, will continue to reboot only the time intervals between reboots steadily gets shorter and shorter. Until finally I get a blue screen that has a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo. Now in the middle of this page with all this mumbo jumbo, is a line that reads ******Address 804661D5 base at 80400000, Datastamp 3eee6c002 - ntoskrnl.exe*****
Not sure what is going on. Reinstalled windows 2000 before, but the guy who ownsw this says that it was doing this before we wiped it clean and started fresh with a new copy of windows 2000 pro. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

 

[dk87]

Two things come to mind. 1. Nachi! What a pain. Problem is, when you reloaded the OS, it didn't have all the patches on it. Another machine that has access to this one has Nachi (or another virus on it) and before you could patch it, it was infected. If this is in a networked environment, check the other machines for signs of viral infection. Virusscan alone may not find it, so look for rogue services and startup items (in the registry). Also, look for signs like excessive ICMP traffic. 2. Power supply. You may have issues with power, either low voltage from the wall or a bad power supply in the machine.

 

[Netherbeast]

I agree, my first thought was either virus or spyware related. I would do the basic runs of Ad-Aware, anti-virus and hijackthis to see what spyware programs are running. If the problems continues, write back.

 

[ptukey]

Well bad news. I can't even get into windows now. Everytime I try I get a BLUE screen that says either it could load the floppy disk drivers or other there has been a couple of other drivers it could not load. Now I tried your suggestion and tried to repair windows last night but everytime it tries I get that same blue screen saying that it couldn't load a specific driver and halts the system. I have no idea what else to do.

 

[dk87]

What did you do to try to repair windows? Also, if you are having driver errors while loading windows, you may be able to work around this by disconnecting all non-critical hardware and then trying to boot. So disconnect all you USB devices, paralell devices, remove any PCI cards, everything but your hard drive, video card, kb, and mouse. Then try to boot.

 

[ptukey]

well to repair windows I used the win2000 pro cd and loaded that. It asked me if I wanted to install windows 2000 and I hit enter, then it said I had a previous version and asked if I wanted to repair it, I said yes. Then as it was loading it would blue screen with all sorts of misssing or corrupt drivers. I also tried 2 copies of win 2000 with the same results. Now could this still be a power supply issue? I have tried removing all no-critical hardware and well it still does the same thing. Blue screen, Blue screen, Blue screen.

 

[dk87]

Doubt it's the power supply at this point, sounds more like a driver, bad drive, or memory chip. Try booting with a chip in only bank 1, or swap out all the chips, just to make sure.

 

[chakk]

I had a somewhat similar problem plugging USB drives into an IBM Thinkpad A30 with Windows 2000 Professional this week. I would get a Blue Screen of Death immediately (or during) the loading of the driver.

I finally solved the problem by going into the BIOS Setup (press F1 during the initial boot) and then disabling the USB BIOS support on the Config page. (The onscreen help says the USB BIOS support needs to be enabled only if you are booting your machine from a FDD attached to a BIOS port.)

I suspect that my USB drives were getting confused with conflicts between the USB BIOS support and the Windows 2000 USB driver support.

 

[karlisi]

Check also for bad capacitors on the motherboard near the CPU.

===
Karlis
ECDL; MCP

 

[TomCologne]

The "mumbo jumbo" BSOD message is not my idea of fun reading, either. On the other hand, it is useful
for troubleshooting, you might even find a KB article for some, although the suggested resolution is
usually the installation of the latest service pack.

I would start by checking if the message changes on rebooting:

Control Panel>System>Advanced>Startup and Recovery: Uncheck "Automatically reboot"

As Karlis said, look at the capacitors on the mb. Bulging and/or residue indicate a bad capacitor, but
it does not have to be that obvious. When a couple of caps on my Soyo mb failed only one of them showed
these symptoms.

The BSODs, however, became more frequent and the message changed almost each time until it would not boot
anymore.

Capacitor failure can cause some serious collateral damage, in my case 1 memory module & PSU!


To test the HDD download a diagnostic utility to floppy from the manufacturer's website.

A free memory test utility is available here:

http://www.memtest86.com/#download0

TomCologne