PC keeps rebooting

Your thoughts would be appreciated on this problem. There is a possiblity that a virus has infected the MBR. The PC keeps rebooting to the Startup Screen and any option selected takes the user back to the same screen. The same thing happens when rebooting from the WinXP CD.

If we recommend starting the PC with WinXP boot disks and go into the Recovery Console and try FIXMBR, we run the risk of damaging the partition tables, if there is a virus or the problem is hardware related. MS recommend running an AV first but how do you do that in this situation. Any suggestions would be welcome.

**EDIT** WinXP Home but it probably doesnt matter. NTFS partition.

Quote:

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By default when WinXP encounters a system failure, it reboots without warning. The setting that controls this can be changed:

Control Panel/System/Advanced/Settings (Startup & Recovery)/System Failure/Uncheck-Automatically Restart. To view the event log: Admistrative Tools/Event Viewer or Start/Run/eventvwr.

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kelly's korner

Thanks putasolutions but Control Panel (or anything else) cannot be accessed. Its in a loop.

Hi AnneMarie,

If you have access to a Win 95/98/Me machine that is running a current version of Norton Antivirus, you can create a set of diskettes that you can then take to the machine that you're trying to fix. See this document for details...

Limerick

Hi Limerick - It looked great until I saw this:

Quote:

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Rescue requires that the computer be restarted in MS-DOS mode, which is not available under Windows NT/2000/XP.

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but thanks anyway :)

Hi AnneMarie,

If you have access to a Win 98 machine, simply create a Startup diskette to use in booting the XP machine. After booting to the A:>, insert the NAV diskette, and let 'er rip! :D

Limerick

Hi Limerick - even though its a NTFS partition?

I did a google an XP bootup loop, and came up with some interesting possibilities,

Drivers quoted here
Nvidia drivers seem to be mentioned on several sites

Roxio Easy CD

Anti virus here

Hi AnneMarie,

In general, that drive being formatted NTFS would indeed be the show stopper, as DOS would not be able to "see" the drive. I guess it depends what sort of virus, if any, the machine is infected with, whether trying the NAV diskettes would be of any help...

Limerick

Hi Limerick - I had already tried booting with a Win98 bootdisk but I could only see the fat32 partition (system_sav), We are trying to save the data on the drive rather than restore to default.

Hi putasolutions - I really appreciate the time and effort that you have spent researching this problem. I cannot open the first link but I have read the Roxio info that you posted. The only problem is that they do not tell the user how to do a custom install when the PC cannot boot to WinXP.

Try the first link again, poor typing on my part. I'll never become a secretary ;)

Boot to a Norton antivirus CD and run it from the CD

Thanks Preachertech, so simple yet I never thought of doing that.


putasolutions, thank you very much for your help. I have saved all the links that you found and I am sure that they will come in very handy in a similar situation (and I am sure that there will be one) :D

What I do in these situations is simply take the hard drive and hook it to a working computer with an up to date virus definition and scan the troubled hard drive from there.