I was having some problems with my computer randomly restarting itself. I checked and didn't have any adware or spyware or viruses. I attributed the problem to it being too dusty inside. I opened it up and cleaned all the dust out with a compressed air can. My power supply fans were real dusty so I took off the one attached to the outside of it and cleaned off all the dust. Unfortunately I didn't know there were nuts on the inside that the fan screwed into. I knew I couldn't have them floating around so I opened it up and got them out. Hooked everything up and it wouldn't work. I put in another powersuppy I had, and still not working. Hmmm maybe motherboard was shot. I moved everything to another motherboard that I knew worked. This is when windows started not loading. I thought maybe I didnt have the heatsink seated properly and it was over heating. I took off the heatsink, cleaned it off, and reseated it with Artic Silver. It is still restarting. I check the temp in bios and everything runs cool. Even after running for a while. Doesn't restart when playing in bios. It comes to the screen that basically says windows didn't shut down properly last time. Gives options for safemodes revert to last known working, and normal. All options end in restart before I get the windows splash screen. Normal pretty much reboots after choosing it. The last thing safe mode loads is giveio.sys. I have no idea what is wrong. Please help me.
Giveio.sys is a driver to allow user-mode programs to access hardware registers and I/O ports, such as for controlling fan speed or monitoring temperatures. It is also for some hardware that needs direct access from lpt/serial ports. It has been known to be unstable with many motherboards. Just deleting the file will do no good or you could just use a boot disk to get into the system and fix it. At the point it sounds like you have got your system into. Your best option may be a format. Then start from scratch. When you get windows installed Do Not install some freeware app for cpu/fan monitoring. As that is likely where the driver comes from.
I do have a program called SpeedFan installed. It has been on the computer for a while and never caused any problems.
I put in a spare hard drive and installed windows on it. Everything boots up fine. Now I just have to figure out what is wrong with the other install.
Ok...seems you found out that the first motherboard may have been bad...since you fired up the machine using the second one. But...it's a different motherboard, so the install of XP isn't going to get very far...some might if the new board uses the exact same chipset as the previous board. Otherwise, as you found out..a new install and it's all back up and running. Why? Cuz you wiped it and started fresh with XP detecting and installing as it needed. Even in Safe Mode, XP needs to know what system chipset driver to load...and it applies those drivers during the normal XP installation to a "Safe Mode" folder on your hard drive. If those drivers don't match up...XP won't start in Safe Mode. ex: swapping out an Nvidia based board to a VIA/Intel board..or Nvidia NForce2 to NForce4
I booted from my windows cd and choose to install windows on the original partition that wasn't loading. Instead of formatting and installing I choose to repaire the installation. Everything seems to be working now. All my programs and files were still there I haven't checked to make sure they all work, but I know at least some of them are working fine. I did have to reinstall AVG Anti-Virus, but that wasn't too bad. *Side Note* I did have some errors come up during the install but things seem to be working fine. I will repost if things change. Thanx again.
