Western Digital - No Boot

[SARGE]

Trying to fix my son's pc, one I built years ago. Is an AMD 900 with Gigabyte board. It boots to the splash screen, shows XP (home edition) loading, goes blank a few seconds then the same splash screen again, then pc shuts down. Does it even in safe mode. I used the Ultimate CD and ran memtest for 2 hours and checked out ok, then did the WD Lifeguard Diagnostics (extended version) and it said was ok. I kinda figure it's not a heat issue since the diagnostics were able to run so long, but to be sure I connected the other WD he had installed in the tower, one he hasn't used for ages (Win98). It boots to its desktop but sits there forever with the little hourglass. I did the msconfig thing and left only the necessary items, rebooted and the same thing (hourglass). I'm just assuming that one is loaded with all sorts of junk, but at least it doesn't shut the entire system down, therefore am assuming it's not a heat issue. Is this the right approach?

Back to the original drive, could a virus (or many) be causing the drive to turn off the system after the 2nd splash screen? If so, please recommend a checker I can run from a cd or floppy. Is there something else I could do in addition?

[rjfvillarosa]

Try a spare known good power supply just to rule that out.
What antispyware and antivirus scanners are you running in your machine? and chance you can slave his harddrive into your machine to run the usual scans?

[SARGE]

Try a spare known good power supply just to rule that out.
What antispyware and antivirus scanners are you running in your machine? and chance you can slave his harddrive into your machine to run the usual scans?

I could but am uncomfortable that if he's got some bad junk it would transfer over to mine. He has stuff on the disk he'd like to keep, otherwise we'd do a zero-fill and begin new, but he's also lost his copy of XP. So, kinda stuck and treading water looking for another way.

[LeftyAce]

It shouldn't transfer to yours; none of those files will get started automatically on your machine as they're no longer on the "C" drive. If you're really nervous, and it's just data you don't want to lose (as opposed to installed programs) you could download a live linux cd such as knoppix (www.knoppix.org) , boot it on his computer, and use an external harddrive to put his stuff onto. Then wipe his hdd.

As far as XP: if you have his license code and any other XP install cd (not an oem Dell cd, a regular holographic cd) you can install using that CD and his product key; it's perfectly legal.

[SARGE]

Am going to try F-Protect from floppies and see what it shows.