Windows NT 4.0 continually rebooting

[oubchy01]

A user noticed his hard drive had become very noisy. He shut down the system and informed me. I restarted the system and chkdsk started up and found many bad clusters. Afterward, the system Blue Screened. I did the repair process with the ERD and now the system gets to the Cntl-Alt-Delete start screen and then, after a very few moments, spontaneously reboots. It is as if someone keeps pressing the reset button. Any thoughts? I would like to get some files off this drive. If I put in a new drive and reload the OS and if I slave this failing drive, will NT recognize the partitions. I know I did this with a Win95 system once.

Thanks in advance.

 

[thatrenowned]

The HDD sounds messed up...try this thing you said about slaving the damaged drive onto another and recovering the files that way.
I don't think you'll have any problems because the other one will be getting very little use as a slave (as opposed to the primary which will be getting major use for important files...if that makes sense).
The only thing I can imagine happening is that it'll slow down the system whilst its in due to the computer having a hard time accessing a damaged HDD.

Rgds.

 

[Shadowblade]

How old was the ERD you used to recover?

My two cents is it has a device in the hive that isn't being used no more. If you can, boot with ERD commander (if it is NTFS, otherwise just boot to dos) and try to alter the registry. Take out any device in the services section you know you ain't using anymore. If you see up to a total new installation, you can always do a parallel installation and remove the old systemroot afterwards.

Regards,

Shadow.

P.S. I had this issue several times on a system with the wrong VGA adapter drivers installed (or out of date). Do you have the same problem when you boot in safe mode?

 

[oubchy01]

My thanks to those who responded. I found an article in
the MS Knowledge Base (Q168502) that describes similar behaviour. While the cause of my problem was different (a failing HDD vs a boot sector virus), I made the assumption that the problem was the same and was able to repair the bootsect.dat file on the HDD to the point that I could stabilize the machine.

 

[Kjonnnn]

Check in MY COMPUTER / PROPERTIES /STARTUP-SHUTDOWN...

See if the Automatically Reboot box is checked?