Is this a Windows XP problem?

[cosrocket]

I have a friend whose son uses ProTools to produce music on his PC. He purchased this PC from a company lat year that has since gone out of business. A few weeks ago he told me the PC all of a sudden wouldn?t boot up so I immediately thought it must be a hardware problem. A week ago he had another friend who supposedly knows a lot about computers look at it, he claims it?s a Windows problem and not a hardware problem. Anyway this guy brought the PC to his place and says he got it to work for a couple of hours, but when my friend brought it back home after just a few minutes it shut down again.
I finally made it over to his house to take a look myself, what actually happens is the PC boots to the Windows XP splash screen for about 10 seconds and then shuts down and restarts continuously. I tried booting into Safe Mode but the same thing happens, it just continuously restarts. There were a couple of viruses (Trojans) on the PC before this problem started happening but I was told they ran an antivirus program and that it removed the viruses.
So my questions, what can be causing this mysterious behavior? Unfortunately he never backed up his files so reformatting is truly a last resort. Is there something anyone can think of to get the PC to boot into Windows?

 

[spyordie007]

There were a couple of viruses (Trojans) on the PC before this problem started happening but I was told they ran an antivirus program and that it removed the viruses.

If it's ever deemed unclean there is no way you can guarantee it clean. I would proceed with a format and a reinstall.

If there is data that needs recovered off the old drive prior to formatting I would hook it up to another (protected) system and pull the files off prior to formatting.

 

[MrChad]

Definitely smells like a hardware issue, but when viruses are afoot, it's tough to tell.

One way to determine if its a hardware issue is to use something like the Ultimate Boot CD to boot the computer. This should allow you to access the hard drives without actually booting into Windows. If you can boot to the CD successfully, it's probably a Windows issue. I would backup his critical files and scan them several times over for viruses. Then wipe the hard drive clean and start from scratch.

If the boot CD fails, it's likely a hardware issue. Does the motherboard report temperatures in the CMOS setup? It's possible that it's overheating. If the temperatures look fine, run Memtest for a few hours and see if any errors are reported. Finally, try replacing the power supply to see if that makes a difference.

 

[daniel49]

just cleaned up a coworkers computer this week that was doing the exact same thing, then her kid turned around 2 days later and downloaded something else and had it all locked up again.

I simply did a temp install on a second hd to prove it wasn't hardware related, that install ran fine so I was sure it was virus/trojan/adware...then just for curiosity ran a scan on infected drive from the temp with a kapersky demo and got over 250 detections:Q

In thier case the kid only used it for gaming, so just wiped the drive.

 

[firewall]

Is Automatic Restart enabled in System Properties > Advanced > Startup and Recovery settings?

That might be causing the system to re-boot continously.