help me diagnose this totally oddball problem

[Koharski]

a friend of mine has an old dell with a 1.6ghz p4 and 512 ram. He just moved into a new place and ever since his computer hasn't booted.

when I first got there I turned on the computer and the system CRAWLED through the memory test and then gave an "unable to boot" message.

I poked through the bios and found that both ATA controllers had been disabled. I reinabled them, restarted and got the same error. At this point I went back into the BIOS and set both IDE channels to auto. The harddrive was detected properly in the BIOS. When I rebooted the computer started to load XP, however before the windows logo popped up the computer restarted. It only got to the part where the white bar goes across the bottom of a black screen, then the whole thing just reboots without any errors at all.

if you left the computer on it would just continue this process over and over.

safe mode does the same thing.

i'm assuming that the OS somehow got corrupted, i'm going back over there tonight with a windows xp disk to attempt a repair on the drive, if that fails i've got a copy of the ultimate boot CD as well.

is there anything else I should check out?

 

[Slugbait]

Sounds like an electrical problem, the outlet doesn't pump enough juice. Might be able to mitigate this with a UPS, but I'm guessing he'll need an electrician. The first thing to try is to take his box home and see if it boots OK at your place.

But the fact that the controllers were automatically disabled gives me pause...it might be as simple as replacing a dead CMOS battery and then globally set the BIOS to default settings. One way to verify is to check the date and time: if it's incorrect, such as being set near the date that the machine was manufactured, that would be a good clue.

Another theory is that the box was handled roughly during the move, and the platters are damaged.

 

[Paperlantern]

X2 on this, I was thinking the same thing about the electricity and the possible damaged in the move issue. FIRST thing is rule out electrical problem, remove it from that environment completely to see. Of course there is also the possability that the damage is done and it may not work still, but that is the first step. Rule that out and post back the results.