Please help!!! I am running a home built 1.8 gig, 512 ram P4 XP machine that has worked fine for two years. Now it started restarting itself after only two minutes. Not enough time to get to system restore. But wait it gets better. Now it won't even get that far. It gets to the screen to pick last good config. Anything I try does not work. I get a boot failure black screen. If I hit f8 during intel screen I have no option to boot from cd-rom, only hard drive and intel motherboard boot. Any ideas?

Make sure you have "boot from cd rom" set in the system bios as the first boot option. It sounds like a hardware failure to me. If you can't get it to boot from either the hard drive or cd, I suspect your mainboard is gone. Also you can try booting from a floppy and see what happens. Let it run and see if it restarts itself.

Thanks for the quick response. I do not have a "boot from cd-rom" option on the bios screen. Is there a way to get that back?

First off, remove any newly attached hardware, if there is any, and try booting it again. If you still have problems then read on.

BIOS vary, you need to look around for a setting for "Boot order" or "Boot priority"...usually it would be under Advanced BIOS features but not on every BIOS. If you're getting an option for "Last known good" your mainboard is not completely "gone" just yet...if that was the case the bootstrap would never get hit and you would get no Windows options at all. It is possible that the CD drive isn't being recognized but I think you would be smart to take a closer look at the BIOS and see if you can find the boot options. Some BIOS will have a section that lists attached devices like hard drives and CD drives...you might want to see if there is a setting like that relating to your CD drive and make sure the drive isn't disabled.

See if you can get into the Recovery Console...it might already be installed, it should be an option on the screen you get that offers last known good, otherwise you'll have to see if you can boot up that CD and go into the repair section of setup and get into the recovery console from there. If you can get in there you could try replacing the system file to fix whatever is causing the boot up problem:

Commands:

C:\WINDOWS>cd c:\windows\system32\config

then do a quick backup of the system file just in case...

C:\WINDOWS\system32\config>copy system system.old

then...

C:\WINDOWS\system32\config>copy c:\windows\repair\system.bak system

then type exit and the system will reboot...might work after that.

If you make it this far, congratulations...but you'd still have to fix whatever was causing the reboots. I would disconnect the internet connection and download Stinger from NAI on a working machine and then run it on the broken machine to see if it finds a virus. If the reboots go away without the internet connection then your machine is probably vulnerable to an exploit...run all critical updates from Microsoft. This could be a little difficult but if you have another XP machine that's not having the problem then you can look at what patches it has and compare the two, then download the updates that are missing from the problem machine to floppies on the working machine and update it that way.

Good luck.

It's a P4 so it positively has to have a boot from cd option somewhere in the boot device priorities. If you still can't find it, let us know what bios name you have in there. Getting to the last known good screen means it saw the harddrive for a while, but I've seen these things so flaky that it's like someone playing with a switch. This same sort of thing happens with the drive itself. My reason for thinking possibly board over drive is that you're not booting to the cd either, but until you make sure your bios is right, we won't know for sure.

Are you getting a little window saying its going to restart or is it just hard rebooting by tiself without anything special/different appearing on the screen. Some viruses restart your computer like the sasser or blaster variations.

I just started it up today and got a black screen saying "Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM\CONFIG\SYSTEM"
You can atempt to epair this fileby starting windows setup usng the original setup CD-ROM. Select "r" at the first screento start repair.

This is the catch now, nothing happens to get to repair. If I touch anything on the keyboard it restarts again. is tis ny help or am I just confusing everyone?

You need to get it to boot to a cd.

The only options I get in the bios start order options are;
Removable device
Hard drive
Intel (I can't even get it to a boot screen now to get the complete name in the blue pop up box)

Is the Removable device suppose to be a cd-rom or floppy?

Thanks for your help, Mark

AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :cry:

Removable device would usually be something like an external USB hard drive or CD drive...ie some device not inside the machine. You could try this option although I doubt it's your cd drive.

I think you might be getting skunked by the BIOS menus...it happens to me all the time. Some BIOS, in my opinion, are hard to navigate and sometimes just changing a variable ends up being a hassle. Some BIOS you have to first pick a combination of boot devices and then tell it, in another field, which device you want to boot first. The BIOS is manufacturer specific, unlike Windows which tends to be the same stuff in the same places, common troubleshooting knowledge on a specific BIOS is going to be hard to come by unless you happen to run into someone who has memorized your particular BIOS screens, its variables and exactly what keyboard commands are required to change it. Some BIOS you change variables with the space bar...others the directional arrows...another the F5 key - look very closely for instructions at the bottom of the BIOS screen, it might tell you how to cycle the various options in a field. Many times with boot orders these days it will be a profile that's a combination of three or four devices that will boot in whatever order so you need to cycle to a profile that has the CD listed as the first device in order. Also, as I said before, make sure you don't have the cd drive disabled in the BIOS or something...I can't tell you where to check that since a setting like that might not even exist in your BIOS for all I know.

I guess another idea would be to try the removable device option. You'd have to find an old external CD drive at the computer shop for a few bucks or something...possibly borrow one from a friend but it might work around the CD/BIOS thing.

Something else to try would be a BIOS update...I'm apprehensive to recommend that since "Diskette" or "Floppy" doesn't sound like it's available to you as a boot device from the BIOS so that might not help since the BIOS is usually loaded from a bootable floppy. Hope this helps.