Restarting > Not booting at all

[Malcs]

Greetings all,

My sister has a Compaq Presario AMD 400 and last summer she said that it was restarting all the time. She keeps the computer at the top of the stairs by a window and in the height of summer I found myself starting to sweat when I sat down to look at her system. Later when I got home and started looking on the net I found most responses to questions about why W2KPro restarts all the time to be a heat issue. I told her about it. She put a fan in the room, kept the blinds drawn and everything was okay.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago when she said the same thing was happening all over again after months of use with it running fine. Only a few days before, my system (the same kind) had similar problems which I couldn't troubleshoot so I just reinstalled W2KPro (and downloaded Adaware from

http://www.lavasoftusa.com

which found 100 cases of spyware on my machine and eradicated them) and I was right as rain again. So I decided to reinstall W2KPro for her and then download Adaware for her too.

So I went over to her place and three or four times I tried to boot the machine up (it kept restarting on me arbitrarily) but could not get it past the startup point to the point where I could reinstall the OS. And then it wouldn't boot up at all. And it started to make funny noises which sounded like it was trying to boot up but then, beep, it wouldn't.

Any idea what the problem might be or is more information needed? No, no new hardware has been added, nor any reconfigurations with the motherboard.

 

[JohnnyTwoTone]

Um, maybe her BIOS battery is low, and BIOS keeps resetting. I know that the one computer I have in my home network that I didn't build myself was jumpered to reset on every boot. Took me forever to figure out why my BIOS settings weren't sticking. I would think that Power Management is default. Look into that a let me know what you find

 

[pbxman]

Sounds like a bootsector virus that isn't wiped out during a reinstall..you need to fdisk /mbr before installing the OS.

Or, faulty RAM could be the culprit, or some bad piece of Hardware. But - thats acting like a bootsector virus, or faulty RAM to me. Has the computer been upgraded in RAM at all? Are they 2 different chips in the same machine??

Lots of possibilities here..BIOS being one, hardware failure/card malfuncion, virus, or that AMD just isn't cool enough.

The adware seems to lead me to believe she's got a ton of "hackware" unknowingly installed..
Pbxman
Systems Administrator

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[pbxman]

Sorry - i forgot..if the computer cannot boot at all..use a startup disk to get to a command prompt and fdisk /mbr it. If you can reinstall the OS after that point, its a virus.

If not - either BIOS or hardware. Take all the cards out that you dont need, and see if it works. Often is the case, a faulty power supply will do that as well, so disconnecting CD-ROMS, soundcards, NICs, etc gives a clue as to what it may be as well.


Pbxman
Systems Administrator

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