About a week and a half or two weeks ago, my computer began to refuse to start up. Whenever I turn it on, it does what it normally does when starting up, but once it gets past the Windows XP loading screen, it reboots itself.

I have tried holding F8 while the computer starts, but it brings up a menu that I don't think would be helpful. I have also tried holding the Del key, but I can't seem to find anything in the menu that appears then, either.

Any ideas as to why this may be happening? I'm not sure what other information might be helpful, so please do ask if you have a question about the computer.

Thanks!

Reboot again tapping F8 and choose Last Known Good Configuration.

Tell us if that alters anything.

Okay, if I hold F8 while the computer is starting, I get a black screen titled "AMIBIOS System Configuration" with a blue menu on top of it titled "Select First Boot Device." The options are:
Here is what I'm looking at:


I'm not sure which of these I should be selecting, so I just press Esc to exit.

I then get another black screen, with the following options:
I select Last Known Good Configuration, wait a few seconds for the screen to change, and then the Windows XP loading screen appears.



I wait several seconds, and then a blue screen appears for a fraction of a second, and then the monitor goes black and the computer restarts.

I don't have time to read what the blue screen says, so after using my webcam to record my computer starting up and slowly playing the video back, I can see that the blue screen reads:

and that's all I can see on the screen in the video. Here is what I am looking at:


Again, after that, the monitor goes black and the computer restarts.

To add to wolfeys post, some motherboards have what is called a boot option menu that comes up if you press f8 too soon. This menu lists all your drives, your floppy, hard drive and cd rom drives and allows you to choose which one to boot from. If that's the case, you have to wait until just after the bios post screen (the screen that shows how much ram you have, and lists all of your drives, etc.) turns black and then press f8. If you see the words safe mode, safe mode with networking and safe mode with command prompt near the top of the screen your on the right screen.

Edit: sorry, should have refreshed my page, I see you have that figured out already.

Ok this could be a number of things Sticky.

First shut down and remove all peripherals such as Printers, Scanners, External hard drives etc.

Reboot and if you still have a problem shut down and remove 1 stick of memory then reboot.

If you still have a problem try the above again on all the sticks present.

Alternatively if you have access to another pc then you can download and burn Memtest from here.

Memtest86.com - Memory Diagnostic

If all still appears to be ok then temporarily disconnect the hard drive, obviously you will get a "hard disk not found" error but ignore that for the time being.

Try these things and get back to us.

Hello stickynote

Has the assistance provided at PC Help Forum assisted you in remedying your issue yet?

An update would be most appreciated.

Thank you.

Marked as Pending