Progressive rebooting....

[Ybotski]

A friends Gateway ME system is doing something odd. From cold it freezes after bios, then after a hard restart it gets a little further in the boot process, another hard restart and it freezes at the safe/normal/logged screen, another hard reset a little further etc etc, until the 6th time when it finally reaches ME. When up and running no problems, no crashes.
I went round to take a look at it; scandisk found no issues, disk only 10% full with very little defrag, virus and spyware solutions up to date and running in the background, couldn't find the event viewer though the user had admin rights (was event viewer after ME?) checked aqll the nlog files I could find. Noted the mouse driver was wrong and updated as it was the only thing I could find that looked odd, opened the box to check for fluff and the fans, all looked fine. Rebooted it fine and cleanly a few times and decided it must have been the mouse driver and left but wasn't convinced.
Sure enough, a couple days later it was 2 attempts per windows boot a week later it was back up to 6.
Any ideas?
Munged Registry?
Dodgy Mobo?
Boot Sector Virus?
Tired Processor?

It is approx 6 years old so am tempted to send him shopping for a new box!

Thanks

Ybot

[chuck441]

Here is something you should examine ... especially if your friend wants to keep his data, whether on an old or new PC ...

I would identify the brand hard drive, then go to the manufacturer's site (Seagate, WD, etc.) and download the bootable ISO file to test the drive.

Burn it and then run the diagnostics, first the quick set, and then the extended if the quick one passes. If it fails either one, back up his data quick (or maybe do it right away anyway)!

Whether it is the hard drive or something else, the behavior sounds more like a hardware problem than a software issue.

[Chaky]

Sounds like bad memory, overclocked CPU or lack of power.

[cguan_77]

It could be a dying psu..

[chuck441]

Well, without any new input from Ybotski, we may never know ... let's hope he gives us some feedback. For all we know, he may have solved it already, or his friend bought a new system and it doesn't matter anymore ...

[Ybotski]

Thanks for replies, a combination of long holidays for both of us has meant that I have been unable to test any of the above as yet. I'll revisit now with some spare ram, the ISO test disc and maybe a spare PSU. Luckily the only data he needs is his favourites list !