What to do when your computer keeps restarting!

DIY-Computer-Repair can help!

You will find more Troubleshooting techniques in the Self Computer Repair Unleashed! Manual.

Last week the wife's computer would not start the Operating System (OS), Windows XP.

What it was doing was a startup loop, it would get to the 'Starting Windows' splash screen then restart.

It would not even start in 'Safe Mode' it would get so far then restart.

Let me explain:

This is a custom made computer -

Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz Processor
2 Gig of memory
80 Gig hard drive
And all the other goodies
Two people use this computer, my wife and my daughter-in-law so whom ever did the computer in is anybody's guess. It is broke and I get to fix it.

The first thing I thought was a virus, so I get out my trusty ERD boot disk and start the computer. Looks good, opps where is the C: drive?

Upon investigation the ERD (which is a Pre Installation Operating System based on the XP installer) could not see the C: partition. How ever it did show in the Drive Manager.

Fix It! Your
DIY Computer Repair Newsletter!
Click here to get your copy of Fix It!

Doing a properties on the C: partition brought up a disk read error but doing the same thing on the D: partition didn't.

This tells me two things -

The drive is not failing
The C: partition has a problem
- Is it a virus?
- Is it corrupt?

The first step is to get the Operating System partition back to where an Anti Virus programs can access it.

So I open the command prompt (Start / Run) and then type in chkdsk c: /r

Nope, because ERD couldn't attach to the partition when it started it would not allow access to the partition.

So I shut the computer down and restart it with BartPE, this has the same type of OS as ERD but more extensive. The BartPE disk also has a check disk batch file that is makes check disk more flexible than running the chkdsk program with the normal options.

Once the OS has started I look at the partition with a program called NTEXPLORER.EXE

Looking at the partition I see five invalid partition entries. This is NOT normal.

Next I run a program called chkdsk.cmd this is a batch file that Bart has made to run the chkdsk.com program with extra options.

One of the options is to remove the bad partition entries and not write them to a file. This is a very good option because if you run the chkdsk.com program with out the necessary switches your hard drive will be filled up with unnecessary files that you will have to delete.

Once I had removed the corruption from the drive the next step was investigate why the drive became corrupted.

I restart the computer and see if it will start in 'Safe Mode'. It does start in Safe Mode.

Next I run Anti virus/trojan/spyware programs.

These programs report over 122 viruses/trojans/spyware. Any one of these programs could have caused the partition to become corrupt.

The computer is now clean and ready to be used again.

Two things about this little scenario -

Don't let anyone install junk from My Space, Face Book, etc on your computer.

Make sure the Anti virus/trojan/spyware is kept up to date.

If someone is using your computer check these periodically. The AVG had not updated in over two months. My fault for not looking at the logs...

Hard Drives, Internal or External, All available at Newegg.com

Are you a member?
Does your Computer need some TLC?
More Troubleshooting techniques in the
DIY Membership Section!

Q and A
This site contains a lot of information. As with any publication not all information is available due to space, time, or subject constraints.

If you have a question that you did not find the answer on this web site you a can ask your question here and we will endeavor to get you the most up to date answer possible!

Free Stuff!

Thank you for visiting my web site, and please come back again.