Hello, I am working on a computer that will reboot as soon as it reaches the splash screen. It has Win 98, Pentium 2, original hardware, monitor. The computer came loaded with Win ME, the owner told me that it was rebooting with That OS. He was told he had a bad hard drive, and replaced it with a NEW 80 gig one. I have done FDISK, reformatted, installed Win 98, and still get the reboot on startup-and on POST. I can get the Dos screen for the six start up options, but safe mode will only work one out of ten tries. I don’t know enough about Dos to try the other options. When I did get into safe mode; I could not see any hardware conflicts in the device manager. The computer does not beep at all on when it reboots? I’ve reseated and swapped the two banks of ram around, tried installing the modem card in a different slot. I can’t get into the Bios to check the settings, NO command will work. The typical keys, DELETE, F2, Just bring up Safe Mode. Typically it will run a scandisk and when finished I hear one click Sound from the tower, then reboots. The monitor shows no error messages just jagged, Distorted color then reboots, and goes into the start up menu option on its own. It will not reboot itself when I have a dos prompt, it will stay on forever if needed. The startup disk does work as it should. HELP, this computer is driving me crazy. I hope someone can provide some useful tips on this confusing problem. When I was in safe mode I checked the properties in drive C: and it did show the 80 gig HD, the correct amount of ram. Thanks………AL PS. The owner did not have an ME disk, that's why 98 was used.

well we now know for sure its not the hard drive,and its not soft ware or o/s as it did it with two difreant systems one a clean install. posables for soft ware related that are left are mbr virus. cure fdisk /mbr bios virus cure fprot anti virus for dos.worst case senario if fprot finds but cant remove bios flash. check out www.badflash.com hard ware cpu fan dose not stay running loose heat sink fan sencer wires loose. heat sencer senceing too much heat when not presant. power supply. ram going or needs reseeting. failing graphics card by sound of graphics but you must likely never got it runing long enogh to install upgrades drivers. bout all i got fer now

Good hints Dave, there was a virus recently kicking around in the wild that just caused autoreboot after a few seconds, then on that reboot it autorebooted again and again and again until you threw the damn pc away with frustration. Might well be what this guy has but I can't remember what it was called. Might be missing the obvious here but usually if you can't boot it off the hard drive, find another logical or physical device to boot it from - such as a bootable floppy to DOS or even a bootable Windows CDROM if the BIOS will allow booting from CDROM. Does the pc auto-reboot in these scenarios within a few seconds? Gotta be said you have a tricky problem there, hope you get it sorted out. Mark

Thank you for the replies. I have removed the modem card, disabled the cd rom, one bank of ram at a time-in each slot. I am not sure how to remove the sound card or video card, they are in a multi bank that is clipped into the tower. The (card?)includes serial, sound, network, usb, parallel. It did not make any difference on the reboot problem, with the cards I was able to remove. I was finally able to access the BIOS by replacing the battery. This is the only way to get to the bios setup. I am able to get the unit into safe mode, is there anything I can do there? can I can update the video driver from safe mode? I have another computer for making floppies or downloading drivers, ect. I tried to turn the machine off in safe mode, with the start button. The machine went to a blank screen and I could hear a faint steady beep (click) coming from the motherboard. I have had the case off since I began to make sure the fan is running, and for easy access. How does one check for a virus, in my situation? The cd rom is disabled in safe mode, please give me the proceedure. Thanks AL

I give up for now I'm taking it to the doctor. I'll keep you posted on the outcome and the price. Thanks for ALL the help, AL2000