Windows restarts instead of shuts down

I just built a computer for a lady with the following:
AMD Sempron 2500+
Biostar M7NCD with latest BIOS
512MB PC3200 RAM
80GB WD HDD
Liteon DL DVD burner
Geforce 2 PCI video card

I installed Windows XP Home and SP2 and everything works fine, except when I try to shut it down using either Windows Start Menu or the Power button on the case, it shuts down then restarts again. It kind of looks like it is not restarting but doing something else, because for a second or two when it comes back up and right before the windows loading screen comes up, a white status bar at the bottom comes up. I have turned Hibernation off but that didn't work.

One thing I did notice is that when I went to System Properties>Advanced>Startup and Recovery> under the System Failure heading and uncheck "automatically restart", it doesn't restart, but it doesn't turn off either. It goes through the shut down of windows but the system stays on. The fans and PSU stay on and the monitor stays on with a black screen.

Any ideas??

the white status bar at the bottom is normal for a windows boot up so there isn't anything to worry about there.

as far as the monitor staying on and going black i somehow have the feeling it's doing something similar to what windows 95 used to do where it would give you the screen saying "It is now safe to turn your computer off" only xp isn't displaying that message for some reason.

Suicide Al said:

the white status bar at the bottom is normal for a windows boot up so there isn't anything to worry about there.

Click to expand...

I've never seen it before on any of my other WinXP machines. . .

it's just the early stages of the NT bootloader that loads the required files for the windows xp screen with the scrolling bar at the bottom. You're probably not seeing it on your other machines because it's something you'll see on a slower machine and looking at your sig, none of your machines are slow.

solution????

are you using a nf2 mb?...... i had this problem with my shuttle nf2 board ..... if i replaced the pci vid card with agp viid the restart problem stopped..... i isolated the problem driver and was able to use pci graphics by doing this:



.... go to device manager and disable " nforce2 agp host to pci bridge"...... that is the nv_agp.sys driver..... now the puter will shut down without any "meddling" in the bios!!!!

and i have a link to another forum where i posted this solution..... but maybe against forum rules here so i won't post a link.... being new i don't know if this is allowed

lldribbler said:

are you using a nf2 mb?...... i had this problem with my shuttle nf2 board ..... if i replaced the pci vid card with agp viid the restart problem stopped..... i isolated the problem driver and was able to use pci graphics by doing this:



.... go to device manager and disable " nforce2 agp host to pci bridge"...... that is the nv_agp.sys driver..... now the puter will shut down without any "meddling" in the bios!!!!

and i have a link to another forum where i posted this solution..... but maybe against forum rules here so i won't post a link.... being new i don't know if this is allowed

Click to expand...

Yes it is an NF2 motherboard, it sounds like you may have found the problem. I will try this when I get home.

And it isn't against the rules to post links to another forum, to help someone out, you just can't post links to advertise and such. Go ahead and post it.

lldribbler said:

are you using a nf2 mb?...... i had this problem with my shuttle nf2 board ..... if i replaced the pci vid card with agp viid the restart problem stopped..... i isolated the problem driver and was able to use pci graphics by doing this:



.... go to device manager and disable " nforce2 agp host to pci bridge"...... that is the nv_agp.sys driver..... now the puter will shut down without any "meddling" in the bios!!!!

and i have a link to another forum where i posted this solution..... but maybe against forum rules here so i won't post a link.... being new i don't know if this is allowed

Click to expand...

Thanks for the input, and WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!

We always welcome sharing information here, so if you've got something, go ahead and post a link - its no problem and done all the time here.

As for the issue we are discussing - you should not be using nv_agp.sys on this system you just built. The nvidia drivers don't play well with older PCI video cards - to fix this though, all that is necessary is to go into device manager for your agp host to pci bridge, and roll back the driver - you want to be using pci.sys, not nv_agp.sys. Disabling the PCI to AGP bridge would also do the trick, however if someone upgrades to an AGP card later on, and it isn't working - they may have trouble figuring out what the holdup is.

Let us know what you try and what works, I've seen conflicting reports from different people on both parts of advice here.

and thanks for the warm welcome..... i always remembered that i had it disabled because of the expanded "disabled" menu in device manager...... and the original thread that got me working on this:

http://forums.pcper.com/showthread.php?t=250200

dribbler

Ahh, it works! Thank you both! I just rolled back the driver to pci.sys and it shut down, no problem. I don't recall ever building a system with a PCI video card and NF2 chipset, so I probably would have never figured it out, lol.

Also, Welcome to the Forums dribbler!