Win ME restarts itself

Good luck -- yep -- that's probably where I would have ended up too.

You thought you had heard the last from me.

I just formatted the hard drive and installed 98SE. The install 'appeared' to go perfect. I was coming up into Windows, for the first time, everything began loading, finding my monitor, ect. loading the desktop, and THE COMPUTER RESTARTED ITSELF !!!!! ARGH !! I unplugged the CD-ROM, thinking maybe that was the culprit... no, now, my problem is bigger than I suspected... my suspicions are on the hard drive, now... but too weird... it let me fdisk it, format it, and load 98SE, with NO problems... just coming up into windows... it bombs... now with 98SE! I think I need to put this thing away for the night, and look at it tomorrow.

Wow--you do have problems... Sleep well...now you have me clueless.

A very sick computer came to me, with ME for an OS, it would restart itself. I formatted the hard drive and loaded Win98SE, successfully. It would never load in normal mode, from install. It will go into safe mode. Suspecting a bad HD I ran a surface scan for 3 hours, and it completed that task, no errors. It will run along in DOS just fine. Never restarts using it that way. I edited the system.ini "display fallback" to =1. It still won't load 98SE in normal mode. I have reseated what I can and used compressed air to clean out the CPU. Does anyone have any ideas as to why this computer hates Windows? Now, both ME and 98SE! I'm not a fan of buying components to throw at something, not really knowing what the problem is. It's a IBM NetVista, 900mz, 20GB, 65MB. I'm suspecting video... it has onboard video. What next? help !

From reading this I would suggest maybe a power supply problem?? Or something deeper then that. The motherboard could be starting to take its last breaths of life or maybe even the processor. Looks like a new PC may be in order. Do you have any PC repair shops in your area that you could take to diagnose it or IBM maybe?

Hi Grinch, actually I started a new topic, in this same forum, with this same PC, different version of Win. (I started it today)... I'm fearing you are correct, and this problem is hardware. I'm suspecting video, which it sports onboard video, soooo... I see $$ in my client's future, unforturnately. It will step into Safe Mode, but NaDa on Normal. Seems like when it begins loading drivers, (even from a new install of Win98SE, so we're talkin' pretty minimal drivers here) it restarts. I had a computer come to me with this problem in the past, and I found a little trick from Knowledge Base, to change the "display fallback" line in the system.ini from 0 to 1. I tried this, on this PC, and still NaDa. I'm bummed.

Do you have a spare video card lying about? Install it and see what happens. You may have to disable the onboard video in the BIOS though.

I'm sorry if this is going to sound ignorant, but... I can put a video card in, and disable the onboard in the BIOS settings? hmmm... that sounds likea plan... would be less expensive buying a video card vs. new MB, eh? I'll look and see. I'm in the process of putting a known good hard drive in, to see if the computer restarts this hard drive, too. To me, that will prove the hard drive is good, and the problem is elsewhere.

Two operating systems railed to run normally on this computer. Suspecting a hardware fault is a reasonable assumption. However, you have not provided any information to support your suspicions that the hard drive, surface mount chips, or CPU. In fact, it appears you're just guessing.

Remove all unnecesary components, set your BIOS to standard settings and restart. If the computer operates normally, start adding pieces until the problem returns. Without specific error messages, you can only resort to the process of elimination; removing hardware is almost the number one step.

jeannepo - I merged your separate post about Windows 98se with this original one since it is simply a continuation of this subject. Please, do not start new posts on the same topic. Thanks.

Are you a PC repair person??? Or just helping someone out? First you said you suspect the on board video now you are talking about hard drives?? Personally I have never heard of a hard drive causing continuous reboots. Bad power supply yes. Bad video drivers yes. The only thing I could find in the MS knowledge base was a reference to having over a gig and a half of RAM which you don't so that is not the problem. RAM will also cause reboots if it is bad but you usually get an error with that. Hopefully putting a new hard drive in fixes you problem.

jeannepo after the post hit F8 and pick the option that lets you confirm what is being processes are being loaded and maybe that will help nail down the bad startup file. Watch for himem.sys

I decided against trying a different hard drive. I've convinced myself the HD isn't the culprit. I've put this HD through it's paces, did a 3 hour surface scan, ran around in DOS and installed (now TWICE) windows 98se, and it hasn't hiccuped one bit... When I F8, when starting Windows, I've done the step-by-step, and tried every combo there, I could think of, which it loads, (w/o anything) into safe mode. You mentioned watching himem.sys ? Can you tell me why?

himem.sys has been the culpurt more than once for me, usually just copy it over with a good working himem.sys file from a win98se boot disk. himem.sys loads parts of windows and dos into the High memory area, so if it is corrupt then it is having trouble loading stuff to the high memory area which would reboot the system. Also safe mode is minumal drivers loaded and the command prompt is just command.com loaded into memory. Hope this helps you out some.

jeannepo - now that you can get into safe mode, in addition to the hardware/driver ideas, have you checked out msconfig to see what runs at startup? Also are you getting as far as you did with ME where you can see the desktop start to display before it craps out on you? If you are getting as far as you did with ME, then something is running at startup that you should probably solve by elliminating it. So for software troubleshooting, you could elliminate most everything from startup except for explorer.exe, rundll32, and taskmon (I think you could get away with just those three for now) - if that allows Windows to load, then start adding in startup programs one at a time until you find your culpret.

When you do the step-by-step confirmation do you get to where you can confirm the drivers? If so, say yes to the first one, and no for all the rest. If that gets you in, then start adding them back one at a time until you find the one that nails you.

Those are the easiest two ways I can think of to narrow down software or driver issues.