I've read a majority of the windows 2000 restart problems on this site - most relating to the system restarting "on its own." I am experienceing precisely that problem - however I have reason to believe my problem is different/worse than most others which were likely resolved by disabling "reboot on error." Initially, my system worked fine - no problems whatsoever. Then, one day it decided to start randomly restarting after a few minutes of desktop use. The problem has continued to worsen, and now the system restarts on its own on or about the time the first windows 2000 boot screen (with color) comes up (following the gray bar advancing from left to right across the screen). The same random restart problem occurrs when I try to boot from the Windows 2000 CD-ROM to do a repair. The same thing happens when I try to use the CD-ROM to install a NEW, clean windows 2000 install. Safe mode does not prevent the problem. The same thing happens when I unplug any, and all of my hard drives. The same thing now happens when I disable, or remove most of my PCI cards. The power supply works fine on other computers. HOWEVER -- and here is the STRANGE twist... With ally hardware plugged in, the computer runs windows 98 JUST FINE. Thus, it CANNOT be a hardware problem - at least in the terminal sense. Drivers, perhaps - but not a true hardware problem. This system, as it stands with the hardware in it, ran win2K flawlessly for MONTHS - yet I can no longer boot reliably, or at all. My system is as follows: PIII-450 CPU (not overclocked or anything funny) Abit BF-6 motherboard (i440BX) 256MB PC133 Micron SDRAM (tested and working fine) PCI ethernet adapter Diamond Viper v770 ultra AGP video card a couple of Maxtor IDE drives ISA- SCSI (nothing presently connected to it) PCI64 sound card (soundblaster) yada yada yada. Any ideas? Could it be a win2K service that is crashing me? Perhaps a funny BIOS setting? I've tried flashing the BIOS to several different revisions, none of which have helped. I also ran Norton Anti-Virus (live updated to May 17th) once when the OS was stable for long enough to scan the whole system - no viruses found. Any help at all on this one is appreciated. I'm pretty proficient with NT and win2K so don't try to water your explanation down for me on account of tech talk - as detailed as possible is best. Thanks!!! Sincerely, Kevin King

Kevin, I just had this happen on my system too. I was working a way in a program then it just restarted. It ran scandisc, then said it reapired the files (it would have been nice if it reported which files). Then about 10 minutes later it happened again. Scandisc ran again and this time it reported some corrupt files. No big deal they were mostly just .lnk files and was able to re-create them. My next option is going to be to run a full surface scan of the hard drive to see if it's going bad. However I noticed you said you removed your hard drive and it still happened. With your system I would suspect bad RAM. You said it worked fine with Win98 so it wasn't hardware, but Win98 isn't as critical with RAM as NT or Win2k systems are. If you have some extra RAM or can borrow some from a friend, I would start there first.

Roger - I have also (casually) tested my RAM. I have 2 128MB DIMMs in there, and went first to only the one DIMM, then only the other, then lastly an entirely different one. While my testing with the RAM hasnt been aas rigrous or scientific as with the rest of my hardware, I'm looking for other avenues to explore. Thanks for your input thus far, keep it coming! Kevin

First thing you should do is go in and UNcheck that Automatically reboot box. Get a blue screen so you can give us some additional details about what is happening. Also, if the thing reboots without a blue screen you'll know it's not Windows having a problem. Another thing to look into is run through the Event Viewer and see what kind of errors it's been logging. Give us more info....!! Oh, and might want to REpost so we can see it instead of hoping someone goes back through the old posts....

OK I have had the same problem, windows 2k just reboots as soon as i get to the log in screen. I mean the screen turn blue the log in box is about to come up and RESTART. It does it no matter how i boot, Safe made, debugging, Domain controllers only,safe woith command etc . . . I have yet to find out how t get into windows to uncheck the damn box. I believe i am doomed to just reinstalling??? Unless someone else can get me into the system.