Hi Can anybody help me with a problem i seem to be having with my brothers computer. The thing is that when the computer starts to boot up and gets to the 'welcome' screen it then reboots itself. It continusly does this in like a loop fashion. The thing is my brother did recall a 'bubble' message from XP and he thinks it said there was some problem writing to the hard drive. Can anybody tell me what might be causing this and can it be fixed. Is it an XP problem? Or a Hard Drive problem? Cheers and thanks for any help

If he got a bubble telling him there was a problem writing to the hard drive then I would take a wild guess and say that the problem is with the hard drive. Windows needs to write to the hard drive during the boot process. If it cant, it wont boot. You need to go to the drive manufactures web site and download their diagnostic application. If that comes up with errors then it will conform that your hard drive is broke. Stuart

Thanks Stuart Will try what you have suggested. Im not sure whether windows had trouble writing a certain file or it was having trouble with the entire hard drive itself. Will give the diagnostics route a try and see what i get. Thanks again

get a debuger look for bad clusters most likey it the hard drive

Can you boot to safemode ? Did he update or install anything lately ? Try physically removing all but the video card from the computer ... can you boot now ? How about Safemode ? While you are in there look at the processor is it free from lint and dust (not overheating ?) Can you get to a C-Prompt ? XP is Rebooting because of a little switch the Brain's at Microsoft put in that tells it to reboot if it cannot recover from an error ... great but if you don't get the blue screen then you don't know what is wrong and therefore cannot fix it ! To stop that you need XP to load (at least long enough to turn off the switch so if safemode work's ...) 1. Right-click My Computer, and then click Properties. 2. Click the Advanced tab. 3. Under Startup and Recovery, click Settings to open the Startup and Recovery dialog box. 4. Clear the Automatically restart check box, and click OK the necessary number of times. 5. Restart your computer for the settings to take effect. Don't Know if this last one will work never tried it but found it just a minute ago When Windows XP begins to boot up and you see the message Please select the operating system to start or hear the single beep, press [F8] to display the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Then, select the Disable The Automatic Restart On System Failure item and press [Enter]. Now, Windows XP will hang up when it encounters the error and with any luck, it will display a stop message you can use to diagnose the problem. The problem could be Ram ... Can you test the Ram in another system (if it is compatable) It could also be the motherboard (if you have access to another hard drive that you can mess with remove the good one install the "mess with" one run the install on that drive and see if it will load windows if it also Reboot's then it is hardware if it works fine then it is software !)