Hi everyone,

I'm Shane, new to the forum so pleased to know you all.

I have been given an E Machine PC to try and revive. If I state the facts below of the problem...

The PC was running XP Home until it went wrong

When you start it up, it sounds quite healthy but after its detected drives etc, it constantly restarts on its own.

I have put the recovery CD in that came with the machine and it picks it up and goes to start the recovery and then says 'please wait' and then it restarts and repeats the process.

I have taken the hard drive out and tested it on another machine and it's fine so I have ruled that out. - Also formatted it ok too.

I have checked for loose connections etc, all fine

My other brain scheme was to use a Win 98 boot disk, format the hard drive and get it going that way but altho it picked up the boot disk, as soon as it gets to the boot options - It restarts... here we go again...

I then used 'Hiren's Boot CD', again it booted but when I selected any tool.. it restarts....

I am really stuck to what it going on, does this sound like a Motherboard or CPU problem? if so I would take it the PC is practically dead...?

I would be grateful for your help, suggestions or ideas etc...

Many thanks

Shane

Hi there and welcome to PCHF, unfortunatly this is out of my area of expertise, but a staff member with more knowledge on the subject, should be with you shortly.

thank you

Hey there mate.

What I would try doing is take out all hardware that isn't needed for now leaving only Motherboard, Processor(with heatsink and fan obviously), hard drives, cd drives and one stick of memory(if you have more, remove them, leaving only 1 memory stick)

If there are multiple sticks, try with one, if that doesnt work replace it with one of the others and see if that works.

If this works you can start adding the devices back to find the problem.

Hope this helps

-Lebowski