Continuous Reboot

A friend has a machine with XP-Home on it which suddenly fails by repeatedly rebooting whenever it's turned on. So he called me to look at it. Some observations:

1) The first thing I see is that it appears to boot properly, then something executes which kills the system. That something may be me invoking a program, or it may happen just sitting there. XP flashes up a full page of error text and then blacks it out in about one second which is really not very helpful. The first line says something about "If you've seen this error before"... On down one can catch a quick flash something about perhaps it's got insufficient disk space. (not the problem -- 20GB disk with 4GB free). Further down is something about maybe newly installed hardware or device drivers something, something, something. There is nothing newly installed though. At the bottom there's a line of hex dump that I have no idea what it is since it disappears so quickly.

2) So my second attempt is to boot the system in Safe mode. That's better, but still very twitchy and will reboot itself randomly. Nothing untoward is in the Startup folder. When I try to restore the system to a previous level the system will fail. "Help & Support" works, but when I click on the "Restore" link I get an error message: "The procedure entry point to UuidToStringW could not be located in the dll RPCRT4.dll ".

3) Running Chkdsk will sometimes find a few problems to correct. I suspect that every time the machine crashes there's a possibility of screwing up the disk a little bit more and creating new problems for chkdsk to find.

4) Unfortunately, I don't think the machine's XP has been updated in a dog's age -- if ever. And it can't be done now because every time I try to do so the machine fails and reboots. Don't even ask about virus software.

Is there anything to do with this short of trying to reload the operating system from scratch? And can I just reload XP without trashing the rest of the disk? I rather doubt that any backups have been done on the system, so I'd rather not trash the data files if possible until XP can be made stable enough to off load backups of the data files.

Any suggestions? Thanks.

Bill

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Continuous Reboot
    ... If this fails, and since if fails after a while in Safe Mode, try booting in ... Safe Mode Command Prompt. ... repeatedly rebooting whenever it's turned on. ... something about perhaps it's got insufficient disk space. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Server Advice Wanted.
    ... per disk on a mildle used disk on the other a hard drive ... > write out to DVDs. ... > expensive to mirror and backup. ... If a 3TB mirrored system fails, ...
    (borland.public.delphi.non-technical)
  • Re: Continuous Reboot
    ... | rebooting whenever it's turned on. ... Further down is something about maybe newly installed hardware ... | 3) Running Chkdsk will sometimes find a few problems to correct. ... | the machine fails and reboots. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: Wierd Looping Boot...Hardware or Software?
    ... rebooting as you have described. ... more consistent and repeatable in where it fails. ... It starts as far as the BIOS screens and then powers off completely. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)
  • Re: zpool scrub errors on 3ware 9550SXU
    ... with 7 stable circa Jun 25th scrubs complete okay on the exact same hardware and v6 zpool as fails under 8.0-BETA1. ... Enable onboard SATA and fit a 300GB SATA disk. ... This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. ...
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