Worth looking at. I was only meaning that if the hardware was old. Can you not get the drive in another computer, get your stuff off, then format it and do a fresh install? Doing an install with data already present is not ideal.

Forgot to add that my mobo supports S-ata raid 0 and 1

Ive just bought a new one after the old one went tits up :lol:

Perhaps it is time to look at some sort of raid setup?

Is it possible to set up raid so that if one drive fails the other one will be ready to go type of thing. Like I said above I have the files backed up but the programs take ages to install.

I doubt it can be isolated to one thing. Its pretty bad if it can't even boot. Normally you would get a boot up with errors.

You need not format the drive, you can install along side old stuff. Personally I would be taking the opportunity to get a new drive as well which is a bit of cautionary purchase but it means you'll get more life out of the computer before it fails again.

[Edited on 14-01-2006 by Ian]

Is there anyway I can remove the drivers from the HDD to avoid formatting the HDD and losing everything?

I have the files backed up but its the programs that will be a bithch!!

You get a core dump don't you?

If its so bad, really there's not much worth looking in to.

Thats a really stupid feature to enable by default.
If you happen to be able to get into windows turn off 'automatically restart on error'.
Would be handy if it let you see what the error was before restarting.

Yeah, or something related to boot up that was causing it. Windows will reboot automatically if something terribly bad happens.

Ok I believe I have found the problem.

I formatted an old drive and put that on and it works. Perhaps I was right in my inital diagnosis that there was in fact a mother board driver conflict?

Tied it, just does exactly the same.

This was one of my first thoughts as the HDD will contain the old mobo drivers and I thought that might be the problem.

try pushing f6 (?) to boot into safe mode, see if that has an effect?

Ive tried a new psu now. It does exactly the same. It is a budget one for about fifteen quid but it said it was 600w and while I know budget ones wont give me that much Im sure it will be enough to power an AMD Sempron 2400+?

When I disconnect the HDD it gets to a screen which says reboot and select proper boot device.

Ive now tried a working CPU with no success

Ive even tried the new CPU in another computer and it runs fine.

I dont have a FDD to boot from

[Edited on 14-01-2006 by Melville]

Disconnect the hard drive and see if you can get as far as getting a boot error as there's no system disc. Also try booting to a floppy.

My first thoughts are power - is the psu sufficiently well rated?

Just bought a new mobo, cpu and some new memory. Im using my existing HDD, graphics card and case.

Ive built computers before so its not as if I have no clue about what Im doing, howerver I have a problem

Put everything together and started it up. Went into the bios to sort the settings out and everything went fine. But when it goes past the bios screen to where it normall starts to load windows it just reboots itself :boggle:

Ive tried some older memory to see if it was faulty but it did exactly the same thing. The memory works fine in another machine. I changed the IDE cables and still the same problem.

Ive tried using a different HDD and it does the same thing. None of the HDD's are blank however. Would this be an issue?

The things left to try are;

1)CPU
2)Mobo
3)power supply.

Can anyone suggest anything to try? If not Im going to have to swap the above parts with another computer to test.

Thanks Mark