Odd issue... Constant reboots on Windows Loading..

[Oh4Sh0]

Well My old neighbors have been having problems with their old HP 1.2 Celly system.. so I figured I'd take a look. What happens is as follows:
The computer boots, makes it to the Windows XP Loading Screen (With the green bar), the bar starts going for a minute, and then it just reboots. Same with safe mode, and with "last good known configuration".
So far I've done a repair installation, re-sat the memory and pci cards, reset bios, and ran fixmbr and fixboot from the recovery console. It's still doing the same thing. The only thing I can think of doing now is reformatting, although I hate to do that to these old peoples' system. They have a bunch of grandkid photos and emails and stuff. (I can probably save some of it by hooking it up to my system..)

Any ideas short of reformatting? I also can't see how that would really help, if the Windows Installation repair (where it recopies the setup files to the hard disk) didn't help. No bsods..

 

[Dangman]

Could be the hard drive dying. Hard drive manufacturers usually have a hard drive diagnostic program available. Find out the manufacturer, download the software, burn to CD and run the diagnostic program.

It could also be the RAM. So run Memtest on the RAM as well.

 

[delemorte]

WIndows is fickle. may need reformat. back up data and reformat..

 

[mikeblas]

Short of reformatting? Sure: use the last known-good configuration, or an even older restore point.