PC problem - any ideas?

[modestjesse]

I'm not as technical as I used to be. Mostly since I switched to a Mac. But my PC crashed a few months ago and I have yet to get it work.

It's an HP Pavilion and I ordered another set of the original CD's that come with the PC. Before I bought those the PC would boot up, load windows, and reboot. So I used the CD's to format the drive and reinstall the OS. Same problem, it would stay up and then reboot.

I sent the computer to one of the techs in the company I work for and was told that the hard drive did fail one of the tests. So I went out and purchased a new hard drive for the system. After installing the drive I again went through the CD install of the OS. I'm able to run through the installation fine and at the end it says it finished and to reboot. After I reboot it would hang after the Windows XP screen. So I turn the computer off and after a few minutes back on. It will pass the Windows screen and then give me a message stating I need to rerun Setup because the OS did not finish installing properly.

This is an endless cycle and it's getting rather annoying.

Any ideas?

[techknowmama]

my best guess would be its the power supply

[modestjesse]

Originally that's what I thought too, but I can keep the machine up for hours with out it rebooting. It will either be hung or I can leave it up in bios. I would think if it was a power supply it would continue to reboot even if I'm only viewing the bios.

[techknowmama]

well actually it takes more power to get the booted into the operating system get all the peripherals up and running than it dose to run the bios or command prompt for that mater, so it is possible for you to set at the bios all day and not have the problem occur.

but lets start at the top, the first thing I would ask you if you brought this to me to fix is:
Did you install any new hardware or software be for the first time it crashed?
if the answer was yes thats were I would start.
if no then, because you just got a new hard drive and reinstalled the os and its still having the same problem I would probably rule out a software issue, but I would check to make sure you had the most recent board drivers,

I would then start swapping parts out one at a time with known good ones until the problem no longer reoccurs

I still have my money on the powers supply, but thats because thats the most common cause of reboot like your describing,
but I have seen mother boards, memory and video card cause similar problems

[modestjesse]

I moved. I shipped the computer cross country, it sat in a box for a month or two or more because I didn't need it and when I hooked it up it wouldn't stay on. I'll try a power supply only because they're cheap. I don't want to invest any more money in this thing since it will only mean trouble. If I get this working again I fear I'll get pulled back into the MMO scene.

I tried removing my NIC and video card but that did nothing to fix the issue.

[striker1211]

I got 20 bucks on loose ram. Boot a live linux cd, google knoppix. That will thrash the ram good. Or just download a bootable memtest86. I also got 5 bucks on dying cpu fan. Powers on, gets just hot enough, reboots.

[modestjesse]

You owe me $25.

Re-seating the ram was one of the first things I did. And the fans spin at a normal rate.

[techknowmama]

well you could get chumy with your local pc users group, and seek out the person who's living room or office most resembles an electronics store, and get that person to help to test parts to see what the source of the problem is before you spend money on parts you may not need,
or at least they could direct you to a pc repair place that wont charge an are an a leg just to look at the thing

if you had one of the new macs I tell you dont wory bout that machine and just
duel boot windows on you mac

good luck

[striker1211]

Will you accept an out-of-state third-party post dated check? Are any of the capacitors (round cylinder things) on the motherboard bubbled at the top? They should be perfectly flat. If they look like a dull pyramid its bad.

[modestjesse]

Interesting turn of events. I requested a free Ubuntu CD and it arrived the other day. Without changing or removing anything on my PC I decided to install it to see if it was a hardware issue or a Windows issue. Linux installed fine with no problems, stayed up and was stable. I tried to run the Windows setup again and again it froze during the install and locked my machine up. I reinstalled Linux and the machine is still up as I am typing this post from it.

I'm at a loss. Could it be a driver issue that Windows just doesn't like? I'm wondering if I should get my hands on another Windows CD and try to install from that.

[tokenuser]

I tried to run the Windows setup again and again it froze during the install and locked my machine up. I reinstalled Linux and the machine is still up as I am typing this post from it.Odd. Windows should run without a hitch. When yo run setup, are you tryng to run it from scratch (ie on a formatted HDD) or over the top of an existing (broken) install? If its a broken install, I would recommend that you run a repair rather than a fresh install.

[modestjesse]

I've tried everything. I first tried to do a repair, then I did a format and fresh install, and when that didn't work I tried to repair that. I've also tried to install over the linux but nothing worked. Each time it freezes.

This whole thing is just fueling my hatred for Microsoft.