Laptop repeatedly restarting

[Shoeby]

I have an older compaq laptop, and when I turn it on, I get the compaq logo to pop up and then it immediately resets and tries to restart. This continues on for an endless cycle.

I have it plugged in, so I'm sure that's not the problem. I can get into the bios just fine and it doesn't reset itself in there. I ran a hard drive test (I don't know what it tested) from the bios and that all came back fine. I tried changing the hard drive to first in boot order and that didn't work, and so I restored bios defaults and that also didn't work.

Does anyone have any ideas as to what the problem could be? I'm getting quite frustrated. :bang head

[I.M.O.G.]

Try booting to a livecd, like Ubuntu. Go into bios and set the CD to be first in the boot order first. I would like to know if its able to boot anything, its quite possible the OS on the hard drive is corrupt and non-bootable.

Also while in BIOS, look for a setting to turn off that initial Compaq splash screen, or display POST messages. Or press the Esc key when it appears maybe - it'd be good to see if there are any messages being displayed at POST which explain whats going on. When that Compaq screen is displayed POST is taking place (Power On Self Test), which could tell you if something is failing POST sending the system into reboot.

[Shoeby]

Yeah, I was able to reinstall windows xp and everything seems to be working alright now. I wonder what could have caused such a problem. :(

Thanks for your help I.M.O.G.