Win2k constant restart: help!

[greenpc]

P2 350 mhz with 136mb ram running Windows 2k (w/sp 4). Machine will almost get to main screen, but at last minute will flash blue screen (with white letters - not long enough to read it) then restart. It will continue to go through this cycle until I shut it down. Tried to start in safe mode, safe mode with command prompt, last known good config, directory services restore mode, and debugging mode but cannot get to desktop screen (remains in vicious restarting cycle). Any suggestions (besides reformatting the drive)?

[bbeard67]

Try unhooking all devices plugged into the PC except monitor keyboard and mouse
If it starts add them back in one at a time until you find the culprit


Did you recently add any new hardware
Video card, sound card, network card, modem?

[greenpc]

No new hardware. This unit is actually a friend's (that I configured for them several months ago - did the vital patches and put virus protection on the unit). I currently only have the mouse & keyboard plugged in. I suspect that it's a virus, but could be ram. Downloaded virus removal tools from symantic [to floppy], but cannot run them from dos. Any virus removal tools I can put on floppy that I can run from dos?

[bbeard67]

136 MB ram?
Ram is a good cause of continuous restarts

[greenpc]

yeah, the motherboard apparently has 8mb onboard (128 chip added)

[bbeard67]

I remember those, I think it might be time for an upgrade.

[greenpc]

This machine is basically used for web surfing and maybe word processing. They (the people I gave it to) are trying to avoid buying a new machine. It's a CompUSA model and is a decent machine for what they do. However, if the problem happens to be the motherboard, then they're going to have to upgrade.

I was able to boot into dos mode and am currently running AVG virus scanner (though it probably hasn't been updated in *months*). So far nothing detected, so it may be ram or motherboard related. I'm going to attempt to update AVG (sort of wading my way through dos) and rescan sometime before reformatting or replacing the harddrive (ugh!).

[greenpc]

Update: tried everything I could think of and finally resolved to reinstall Win 2K. Many problems reinstalling over prior Win 2k, so reformatted the drive and did fresh install. So far no problems (except cannot read a cd-rw - but can read cd -r: think it's just an old cd drive).