Please help, my PC wont boot up!

[delambo]

I am running windows XP sp2. I was using it fine before I went to work and closed dwn as usual. When I got home the light in the middle of the power switch was flashing. I moved the mouse and nothing happened so I pressed a few keys, ten tried ctrl+alt+del but still nothing. I then tried pressing and releasing the power button but again nothing. I pressed and held the power button to shut the machine down then pressed the button to turn it on.

Now I got a black screen followed by a white bar from the left to the right, ten the windows splash screen. This continued for some time then it reboted,and repeated the process several times.

At this point the wife told me that she used the PC earlier and insted of shutting it down she put it in to hibernate.

I tried switching the machine off at the wall then restarting and selcting normal start at the safe mode prompt. Again it just kept getting to the normal point where it would show the user list and it restarts over and over again.

I unplugged the machine again and selected last known good configuration but no change when I try to boot.

Finally I unplugged the machine again and selected safe mode. I get the dos type prompts scrolling down the screen and when it gets to the point at wich it sould enter safe mode, it just restarts again and again and again!!!!

I have entered the bios and checked that all is OK there and it does appear to be so.

What can I do now?!

[Possy_99]

my advise would probabbly be to bite the bullet (so to speak) and format/reinstall

[callo]

EXACLY the same thing happened to me a month ago.... i blamed the kids...lol

ended up doing what possy says and reinstalled

[Possy_99]

..turn the hibernation option off (in control panel / power) it's a pain in the **** anyway, and turning it off will free up some of your hard disk space too

[topcat99]

Format is the easiest answer - may have a virus. A bit of advice though. If you do format and havn't already - setup your disk with 2 or more partitions that way you can install your data on a seperate partition for safety.

[smit99]

Woah! Don't format the disk just yet!

Firstly, when you press F8 to get the 'safe mode' menu, there is an option on there which says something like 'disable automatic reboot on system error'. Choose this, then reboot, and the system should display the error that is causing it to reboot. If you can post it here someone should be able to point you towards the problem.

The other thing to try is to boot you machine to the recovery console. To do this, insert your XP CD in to the drive and boot the machine from the CD. Follow the instructions to get to the recovery console, then run CHKDSK /R, then do a FIXBOOT. Remove the CD and try again. Hopefully the PC will now boot. If not, I think a re-install is your only option.