help my winxp pc wont bootup stuckinloop

gamer

i have a problem with my pc duron1.3 ghz 256mb mem with windows xp.when i turn it on it goes to win menu ie safe boot boot by dos prompt ,,,normal boot ,,,or safe mode etc..so whatever i choose it starts to load files ,,driver sys etc but never gets to windows load screen or windows logo it justs resets itself goes back to initial load mercury logo ,ie its a mercury motherboard..i bought it from dealer 9months ago..looks like drive is faulty or else my xp is screwed up bad.drive is 60gig 20gig free. pc knocked itself off suddenly when i was playing rts game last night.is there a disk i can get on net that,ll bring me back to last xp save configuration or will i just use a boot disk to look at the drive?it looks like its doing soft reset by itself after 10secs of trying to load xp.the last week xp crashing alot ,,ive got about 40 games on the system at present.its got onboard video and sound.i cant go to dos or safe mode it just goes backto mercury logo.i havent tried a boot disk yet.

Col_Loki

Have you been changing FSB settings or overclocking lately? Sounds like an overstressed CPU - But i could be wrong.

gamer

no i have made no change at all to bois settings or fsb or memory timing ,,,this machine is fast enough ,,i dont bother oclocking or messing if i want speed i can always get

Col_Loki

You could try step by step confirmation .... Prob wont work but...... Press and hold the F8 key when your PC is starting up , a menu will apear that will allow you to confirm every step of the load up. Mite help you to find your prob. Other than that all i can suggest is to reload XP!!

BKtje

i got this problem on my machine there a while ago when i was making a load of changes and trying to get a dead hard drive to err not be dead

It was infact caused (in my case) by the hard drive. It would attempt to load the OS and when it failed it find it it rebooted.
Was fine once i removed the hard drive (and re-installed OS on other hard drive. so im assuming it was the dodgy hard drive and not a corrupt OS).

However i got SMART errors warning me of the hard drive being dodgy. If your mobo supports this (and ur hard drive) and you dont get this error its unlikely to be what i had.

Good luck tho, a none working PC always makes me wanna pull my hair out

gamer

i fixed it myself ,,when the machine crashed i think it changed drive settings ,,,so i went to bios and set ito bus mastering on and switched off fast boot ,and set it to look for ide drive 0,1 ,,and 2
and winxp just worked as normal and now its working fine ,, no crashes or looping,,it prbly overheated though it has temp sensor on motherboard,.thanks for the advice anyway.