Computer Keeps Rebooting

[notsure]

Two days ago I reformatted my hard drive with no problems, I am running Win98. One day after the refomat my system began restarting or freezing up completely. If I am lucky to make it to the desktop it will freez up or restart on its own. Thinking I had a corupt install I attempted to reformat again and start over. In the middle of clearning my hard drive it froze at 14% and then restarted.

I shut down, restarted in safe mode, while looking at the device manager I didn't see any conflicts the system restarted on its own. I can't reformat, I can' t work in safe mode. Anyone have any suggestions? Could this be my hardware?

Thank you

 

[dmw16]

My first thought would be power supply. What brand? How big? I know it started right after you reinstalled windows, but still. Also have you tried booting from a CD/floppy and reformatting from DOS and then reinstalling?
-doug

 

[dragfree]

Could be lots of things. Check for conflicts in configuration of IDE devices--I recently had the same problem and solved it only by setting CDROM as slave and HDD as cable select! (Beats me--but that IDE controller--on ASUS P4S533--is flaky and won't work if a USB port is connected to USB header #2 on the board.)

Sometimes it helps to set everything (Motherboard, CPU, RAM, etc.) to default values when trying to track down the cause of a glitch like this.

 

[Alkali]

Your first test must be to leave your PC in Safe Mode for an extended period of time.

If your PC does not crash after a day or so in safe mode, it is not a Hardware fault - Although I heavily suspect that it is hardware in your case, and I would change the PSU as my first option, after I knew it was Hardware.