IP35E now stuck in constant reboot...

[gsteffens]

Well my custom rig was working as good as I could ask for for a while, until last night it froze while playing an old game (original Red Alert), so I had to manually shut it down. And now when I turn it on, it just gets to the 'windows loading' screen and then the screen goes black, and it reboots, and then it repeats.

The only thing I had to do to get the Original Red Alert to play was run in it "windows 95 compatability mode."

I tried clearing the CMOS by the directions in the IP35E manual, to no success.

I have an IP35E board, Intel Q6600 Processor, two 1GB sticks of Crucial ballistix ram, a GEforce 8800GTS 512mb card, and Seagate HD. Antec 500 case with an antec 550W power supply. I am using Windows XP Pro.

Was humming along nicely until recently. All that has been played on it are a few of the Command and Conquer games, Battlefield 2, and my sister plays Sims 2 on it. All were playing smooth as glass.

Any advice? I'm headin off to school now but I will check back in a few hours when I return.

This forum has done wonders for me before, I'm sure this time will be no different!!

[veedubfreak]

Try using the windows repair. If its getting that far, it sounds like the boot sector might have corrupted on the hard drive.

[gsteffens]

How do I go about doing that? Do I boot from the original XP CD and select that option?

From what you are saying, is this a matter of just 'resetting' the boot sector, so to speak, or is this a possibly toasted HD?

tried that with 'fixboot' and it did not help. the screen goes like deep blue, goes black, then deep blue, then resets after the windows loading screen.

EDIT:

I think my hard drive may be toast. I have been reading around and it seems that could cause this problem.

I hope there is some sort of warranty on the HD. I haven't even had the whole puter but a few months! argh

[veedubfreak]

WD have a 3 year warranty and Seagate have a 5 year warranty. Although these days its almost easier to just buy a new drive. One thing you might try if you have access to another windows box. Put your hard drive in it as a slave drive, and use chkdsk on the drive. That can sometimes recover the drive to working condition.

[gsteffens]

well a buddy of mine helped me do a repair windows run on it with the XP CD and I'm on the computer now, but i am struggling to get the sound to work! I ran the install driver on the CD and the 'device cannot run' IE I look in the device manager and there is a yellow exclamation point next to it.

Dunno what to do! Really hating this ABIT Board!!!