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XP Reboots on Boot

J

jitspoe

Senior member
I've had this gaming machine for over a year and it has been rock solid. Until about a week ago, it had never crashed. I have an EVGA 7800GT with the "free" EVGA motherboard (nForce 4 chipset), AMD Opteron 144, Seasonic power supply, X-Fi sound card, 2 gigs of patriot (I think) memory, and a couple PATA Seagate hard drives.

A week or two ago, I was searching for a file or something, switched over on my KVM, and when I switched back, it was sitting at the BIOS screen saying something along the lines of "INVALID SYSTEM DISK. INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER." That freaked me out, but it just ended up being the boot order in the bios getting switched around. I have no idea how. I switched it back, and everything worked fine...

Until the next day, when I got a nice BSOD when I was running a backup of my data:

MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION

0x0000009C (0x00000004,0x80545FF0,0xB2000000,0x00070F0F)

Googling around, it seemed it had something to do with the hard drive controller, or nvidia's drivers for it. I had never installed those drivers, and never had a problem before, but it made sense as the crashes seemed to be related to heavy hard drive activity. After another crash or two, I ran memtest86 and prime95 for about 24 hours each. Neither had any problems. After that, everything worked fine for about a week. Until now. I exited BF2 and my computer spontaneously rebooted (no BSOD, just a reboot), and windows just reboots right after it gets past that little progress bar every time. It doesn't matter if I try to boot in safe mode or what. It simply reboots every time I try to load windows. I tried a knoppix boot cd, and that worked. I'm not sure if it's a problem with windows, a hardware issue, or what. I'm considering getting a PCI IDE controller just to see if I can boot off of that (can you boot from those?).
 
Run a quick chkdsk in cmd to see if it's your hdd first before getting a new controller.

Also, try switching the IDE cable to the next slot to see if it still has the same problem. That should give you a good idea if it's the controller in general that's bad if you've already checked the integrity of your hdd.
 
I had never installed those drivers
Click to expand...

Edit:
sisq0kidd: I can't get windows to boot, so I can't run cmd. When I booted knoppix, it saw the drives and data just fine. I just tried swapping the ide connections around as well as unplugging all my other drives. It still reboots as windows is loading.
 
You know, I'm almost sure there's a forum for this type of question...

Anyway, I had almost the same problem. Windows would reboot while booting but would only do it once. The second time it was booting it would load up fine. Problem went away on it's own so I don't know what to tell you.
 
This thread is now about the Bunny With Pancake Photos. I love those! There's so many different ones! Oh, and Limecat...those are great too!
 
SagaLore: Windows doesn't boot, so I can't tell you what Device Manager says. The cables are rounded. I could change them, but I doubt it would make a difference since they haven't caused any issues before. I can't find any kind of "bursting" setting in my bios. Does it go by a different term sometimes?

FoBoT: I'd really not like to reformat unless I'm sure it's an issue with Windows. Otherwise I'd just be wasting time. MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION is a hardware-level error reported by the CPU.

I went ahead and purchased an Ultra ATA/133 controller card. It didn't change anything. Windows still reboots during the boot process.
 
Well, crap. I guess the OS is at least part of the issue. I put the drive in another machine and it did the same thing. I think the last set of windows updates screwed it up. I don't suppose there's a nice way to avoid having to reinstall and configure hundreds of programs and games and whatnot if I've still got the data?
 
Originally posted by: jitspoe
Well, crap. I guess the OS is at least part of the issue. I put the drive in another machine and it did the same thing. I think the last set of windows updates screwed it up. I don't suppose there's a nice way to avoid having to reinstall and configure hundreds of programs and games and whatnot if I've still got the data?
Click to expand...

Oh 😕 Ignore my last post then. 😛

Have you tried running Windows recovery on it?
 
I haven't tried running recovery on it. I'm installing windows on another drive just to make sure it works at the moment. If it does, I'll make a backup and try running recovery. And no, I don't overclock.
 
Well, I managed to copy some dll files and stuff around on my old install and get it up and running again. Thank goodness. Took over 2 hours just to get a test install up to the point where I could try BF2. I was not looking forward to reinstalling 150+ games/tools/applications/etc.
 
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