XP keeps restarting itself continually

[ando57]

I have an XP machine that gets a stop error when booting up (even in safe mode), unfortunately I had not turned off the brilliant feature that XP has of rebooting on system failure. So I have a continually rebooting machine and don’t have time to read the stop error. Is there any way of turning this feature off without actually being in windows? Can you perform a Registry edit from a boot disk perhaps?

 

[linney]

Here's two things you can try.

This option will use the Recovery Console in an attempt to replace your Registery with an older uncorrupted one.

An easy to follow recovery console description when unable to start computer due to corrupt registry.

http://www.mediaworkstation.com/htm/homeset1.htm

Click on Tutorial then the Charlie White article on XP crash.
This is a laymans version of Q307545 in simple language.



Option two is you could try repairing windows itself by running it over itself. You will lose all your windows updates but your files will be untouched.

How to Perform an In-Place Upgrade (Reinstallation) of Windows XP (Q315341)

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q315/3/41.asp

 

[rs387]

Have you done anything to your hardware recently? New CPU? I had a problem which had the same symptoms. Checked lots of stuff, in the end it turned out that the cooling fan wasn't perfectly aligned to CPU, which would cause a blue screen or an automatic restart depending on settings.

 

[ando57]

Thanks for the posts,

This customer has a laptop with no hardware changes from the original package. In the end the customer couldn't afford the time for us to look into this and reluctantly agreed to a destructive recovery. However I'd still be interested in knowing if anyone knows a solution.

Is there no way to make a boot disk and then do a regedit to remove the reboot option??

Any comments welcome