reboot loop

Hello,

I'm helping a friend who is unable to use her computer because every time she boots it, it gets stuck in a reboot loop. Just when it seems to be fully booted (desktop & icons present), it restarts. She can only stop the loop by doing a hard shutdown.

The problem started around the time she did September's updates.

She has a Gateway eMachine, which was sold with no recovery disk and has no recovery partition.

System Restore to an August date does not resolve her issue.

She can boot into safe mode. Are there any diagnostics she can run to isolate the problem?

 

To troubleshoot, boot to Safe Mode and change your settings to leave the BSoDs displayed. You can do this by clicking your "Start" button and clicking on "My Computer." Click "Properties" and go to the "Advanced" tab. In the "Startup and Recovery" section, click the "Settings" button. Clear the check mark next to "Automatically restart." Click "OK. "

Start Windows XP in Normal mode. When the BSoD displays, record it word for word, including the first few strings of numbers.Then post your findings back here.

Meanwhile, please follow the instructions below as this may fix the corrupted file/s that are causing the problem.

If the system then boots up normally I would recommend a virus scan as it was probably a virus that caused the corruption. Go to this link and download this free virus scanner from microsoft, you can then continue to use it to protect your computer.

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/support.aspx?mkt=en-us

 

These are my friend’s notes from over the weekend (I’m reading from handwritten notes and may not have all the spaces in the right places. Sorry):

SATURDAY:

Got the following message:

She also reports:
Tried to boot up in safe mode. Would not. Booted up normal then re-booted. Tried to boot into safe mode again. Would not. Did a regular boot. Message:

Then normal boot. Performed disk cleanup and disk defrag.

Scheduled a CKDisk. Turned computer off. Hard shut down "“ would not do normal shutdown.

Turned computer back on. Went into CKDisk. Performed all five steps. Did not find any problems. Started to boot up and began reboot cycle. Computer would not shut down "“ had to do another hard shut down.

SUNDAY:

Turned computer on and got message:

She ran virus and spyware scans with resident CA software on Sunday, with nothing found.

The computer has not been shut off since.

 

It certainly sounds like an infection. No AV software is 100%, your own AV software must have missed something that another AV will find.

Follow Broni's instructions and it will all be resolved.

 

I have fw this info to the user and asked her to start the process. I encouraged her to set up her own account here for follow up.