I have my mother in laws pc which now wont boot up after the power went out.Its only about 5 months old with new memory,mobo,cpu and hard drive.All I know is its running xp Pro Asus mobo 3 ghz cpu and 1gb ram .It will start and loads up tp the windows logo goes to the black screen with safe mode options but none of them will work and restarts itself.I have tried to do a windows repair and it will only go as far as press F8 to agree to the terms and conditions and stops there it wont go any further.Could it be the power supply? Its the only thing on the case that isnt new.Thanks for any help i get.
I would suggest you start from scratch and wipe the hard drive down and re install everything then back up to save doing in the future.Looks like only a clean install will solve the problem.
That is one solution, but before you do that, unplug the PC from the power completely, remove the CMOS battery and reset the CMOS jumper (see motherboard manual for jumper location). After an hour or so, put the jumper back, re-install the battery then power the PC back up again. If you still get problems, the XP install has obviously been corrupted by the outage. Before you reformat though, try putting in the windows XP and running repair from the recovery console.
also keep in mind that the power outage might have been due to a power surge i've had faulty hardware play me like that too but more then likely your data on your harddrive got zapped oh ya and the power supply usually works or doesnt work. only once have i had a power suppy cause reboots... it was right after i got a power surge ... the surge made the circuit breaker in the PSU over sensitive best just do the process of elimination..start with software hey good luck and keep us informed
Power supplies can cause reboots if they're unstable, but typically if they do that they're in the process of going wrong. If they're damaged, they'll simply shut down at a certain point or not power up at all.
You really need to check the psu by substitution as soon as possible. Leaving a faulty one in and putting up with the random shutdowns is a sure fire way to kill all sorts of other things which may cost many many times more. I found a way to check the psu functions by using task manager. But I'm not a windows user.. I remember that we used it to monitor performance and noticed the cpu 1.75v rail flickering on and off when the reboot happened. Turns out that the pc owner had taken the machine to a well known local cowboy (if you know me pm for more details) some weeks earlier who had stolen his working psu and fitted a faulty one.. probably selling his psu for full price to the person who originally had the dead one.. Not good service from somebody who was paid £80 to reinstall xp heh?. Of course he denies everything, but as I built that pc from scratch some 3 years ago, and nobody had ever been in the psu explain why it had a 750 watt one when the original was only 400 if it hadn't been swapped? The result of all this huffing and puffing from the faulty psu is now a faulty mobo. The 640K base ram is up the spout. He is another XP only person, which is a shame as every time he hits a program that uses the base ram everything crashes.
Hi A big Thank you to everyone who helped.As it turns out the windows registry got corrupted from the power failure.Although Im not 100% sure as I tried to do a windows repair myself but thats what the pc company I took it to tells me.Anyway once again THANKS
