Win XP Home reboots, reboots, reboots

[knownot]

My daughter has xp home on a two year old eMachine. It boots up to the point you think you can go to work and then suddenly reboots and the cycle keeps going. It works fine if a disk (any disk) is in the cd-rom while booting. I unplugged the cd-rom and also installed another one - same thing. This did not happen immediately after installing hardware or software. The only thing we know is that a disk was left in the cd-rom overnight - computer turned off. Help, please.

[rjfvillarosa]

Is anything displayed before the reboot ie: error messages or a blue screen?

[Panama Red]

First I'd disable the Auto Restart on error so you get a blue screen with an error message. Right click on My Computer>properties>Advanced tab>Settings button under Startup and Recovery>uncheck Automatically restart under System Failure.

The resulting blue screen will give you an error message that should help diagnose the issue. Write it down and post it here if you need help.

[knownot]

I hope I am responding correctly, this is my first time in any forum. No blue screen or error message comes up. It would not let me boot up in safe mode nor in last known whatever. The automatic restart is disabled (and was at the time). It acts as though I am purposly rebooting. Also, I ran restore and went back about one week - no change.

[glc]

If there's no data you have to recover, it may be easiest to use the Emachines restore disk and get a fresh start. If you need to recover data, you can remove the hard drive and put it into a USB housing or slave it into another computer to copy data off.

There's a good possibility it may just have a virus or some really nasty spyware, if you pull the drive, scan it before doing anything else with it.

It could also be a hardware issue - weak power supply, defective ram, defective hard drive (bad sectors).

[rjfvillarosa]

How old is this machine and do you feel confident enough to take the side cover off the tower?
There are a few simple checks you can make first to make sure it is not a hard ware issue. Remove the side cover and check the machine for dust and fluff build up on the CPU fan and heatsink. Unplug all the peripherals from the machine except for keyboard, mouse and monitor and start it up again.

[knownot]

I think I am going to take the least technical route and just restore it and see what happens. I will follow the hardware related suggestions if restore does not solve the problem.

[knownot]

Found the Problem! By accident of course. I booted up with a disk in the cd-rom and was preparing to copy some files just in case when I noticed Microsoft Antispyware wasn't acting quite right, so I uninstalled it. Presto, the computer started booting normally. I reinstalled the spyware program and everything seems ok, for now anyway. I should have thought of that because I recently uninstalled Microsoft anti-spyware from my computer and solved a problem with my context menu freezing - I paid for Webroot instead.

Thank you all for your input.