PCA Forums

Last night my system rebooted while I was online. It started into windows and I had the white desktop and message "Windows detected error in active desktop click here to restore Active desktop" and I clicked. The system rebooted!
Now it is in a loop, the system boots to a loading windows screen and after sitting a short time the system reboots again. That's screens as far as I get the reboot, it's in a loop. This is W2K SP4 rollup 1

A few nights ago I was using the another system and I heard a bootup beep, when I looked the system was booting up, it had been sitting running idle for hours. After that reboot I had no other problems with it till last night.

Of course that is my system I use for internet at home.

AMD 1700XP, IWILL 333XP system board, and W2K.

My suspicion is that either your registry is corrupt. The question is what caaused the corruption and will it recur? Perhaps Windows crashed and rebooted and the crash occurred during a registry write which corrupted it. You may also have some bad sectors on the hard drive or it may be failing.

If you have a copy of Spinrite I would recommend doing a level 2 scan of the drive with it. If you don't have Spinrite then run a CHKDSK /R on the drive. You'll have to do this from the recovery console, a BartPE boot CD, or from another working PC while the drive is connected as a spare (whatever is easier for you). This should fix any weak sectors.

Afterwards try booting again and see if it boots (it may not if the registry is still corrupt). If not then press F8 after POST to get to the boot menu and select "Use Last Know Good Configuration". This will restore the registry to the condition it was in the last time Windows successfully booted into Windows.

If that fails try booting into Safe Mode which will disable many startups. If you're lucky it's one of the startups causing the problem and you can disable it. If you can't boot into your user in safemode, try booting into Administrator.

If all that fails, unless you are using something like ERUNT to backup your registry and can restore from a backup, or you have an old image of the hard drive, you may be up the creek. Your only other option is a repair install which probably not work on a corrupt registry.

If you manage to get it fixed, I strongly recommend you download ERUNT and backup your registry once a month since Win2K has no built-in registry backup mechanism.

Hope this helps...

Thanks,

I saved your post to my drive as a text file so I'll have it when I go home.

I have Spinrite I think. I just downloaded the ERUNT now to have later.

I'll be leaving here soon and be home in a couple hours, got a little running to do first.

I did not get to try fixing this yet, instead I broke another one!

I started the PC just to see and I got into Windows further, took longer to reboot but it did reboot!
I went into bios and watched the temps, CPU started out about 48C and sitting idle it went up to 59C! Warning is set to 60C and shutdown at 70C

I looked inside the case, wow the dust on the CPU heatsink, I dought it's getting any air! I was going to clean the insdie of the case, everything but then I broke another computer trying ti install a program. I'll post that one when I get into wifi in minute.

Sitting in car it's hard to type and they open anytime nowl

Anyway do you think heat is causing the reboot? It certainly does need cleaned bad for sure anyway!

I normally clean them every so often, I live off a dusty dirt road and use wood heat etc.. so they get DIRTY inside. I must have missed this PC last time. It's in the dustiest area and used the mostl The ither I looked in are not very dirty now.

Well a hot PC can crash or lockup, and might shut down if it overheats. It usually doesn't cause a reboot loop directly. But you may have corrupted the registry somewhere along the way if it crashed due to overheating while writing to the registry.

Heat also kills hard drives.

Do I win a prize (like a knock in the head ) for having the dirtiest PC anywhere in the last 10 years!!

Man that was so filthy in there, I never let them get like that ( normally)!
I spent an hours cleaning, got it good enough for now, this weekend I will blow it out and look for my Artic Silver and regoop the heatsink when I wash it!

For now I got it to boot into windows and load up fine 2 times after the cleaning, then I went into Bios and watched the temps. Dirty it got up to 59C Idle, now it get s up to 47C idle, cleaning the CPU Heat sink shaved 12C at least just idle! Maybe working loading Windows and all the other junk at startup pushed it the other distance from 59C to 70C, only 11C more, and 70C was set for shutdown.

I am on it now online.

I live in the woods, a bit dusty around here with the dirt roads and I use an indoor woodburner and fireplace. This system sit near them and a window, must just be sucking dust from everything it can find. I NEVER had one this dirty before and maybe I missed it last cleaning also? I try to clean them 2X year at least. Don't look like I did this one for awhile though.