PC constantly reboots

[PhillCo]

My five year old pc has started failing to boot properly.

It runs through the POST OK and starts to load Windows XP, but after the XP splash screen (the one with the moving blue progress bar), the screen goes blank. It continues to access the hard drive, but then the disc spins down and the pc starts the boot process all over again.

This can happen numerous times (constantly for up to two hours!) before it will suddenly boot completely and show the log in screen. Once it does that, the pc behaves perfectly until I next have to reboot.

I suspect something is wrong with the C: drive, but I'm not sure what I can do about it.

I have another drive in the pc with about 30Gb spare capacity. How could I go about moving the Windows installation to this drive so that I don't have to go through the pain of reinstalling Windows?

Any help/thoughts appreciated.
Cheers
Phill

 

[ch33zw1z]

To move the install to the other partition, you want to use an application such as Symantec Ghost or Acronis TrueImage. Acronis > Ghost IMO, much easier to use and more robust, well worth the money.

It isn't a bad idea to just copy the data you need off the drive and get a new one, hard drives are cheap compared to 5 years ago..

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Continually press F8 while starting and select safe mode. See if that works, if not try the same with the last known good option. Failing that, run a memory test, www.goldmemory.cz and then try a spare power supply

 

[PhillCo]

Thanks for the suggestions.
I've downloaded the Western Digital drive diagnostics app and its saying there are errors on the drive. It looks like the drive is dying.

My ideal, albeit short term, solution would be to make a c: partition on the d: drive, mov eeverything from the current c:, disconnect the current c: and make the new c: bootable.

Do you know if I can do that with Ghost or equivalent and if so how?
Cheers
Phill

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Just leave the drives as they are, boot to ghost. Copy drive A > Drive B and then remove drive A. Ghost will move the boot record and everything else to the second drive. All ghost does basically is make a bit for bit copy of the drive. You may fail on this however since the source drive is going bad

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Oh, I also forgot to mention that you want to make sure that you dont have data you need on drive B because if you do ghost WILL wipe it out

 

[PhillCo]

But there is data I need to keep on the 2nd drive. c: is 40Gb, d: is 80Gb so I guess I need to create another partition on d: to copy the c: drive to??
Cheers
Phill

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Yes, think of it like this, current disk we will call partition 1, second disk needs to be divided to make partitions 2-3. I personally would move the data from part 2 to part 3 and then ghost part 1 to part 2