Power outage, PC now just keeps restarting over and over?

[Denvers Dawgs]

This evening a quick thunderstorm passed and we lost power for about 30 secs. About an hour or so later I turned on my pc(HP Pavilion w Xp Home), and the check disc for errors scan appeared. I let it scan everything and when it went to boot it brought me to the (DOS?) Screen where it allows you to choose:
-Safe Mode
-Safe Mode with Network
-Safe Mode with Command Promt
-Last known Good system
-Start Windows normally

Tried every one of these and when the PC boots up it gets to the Windows XP screen and then just restarts over and over again, no matter what options I choose? Any Ideas?

[redwudz]

If you were unlucky enough to lose power as the OS was writing to the boot drive, it may be a corrupted boot drive, maybe the boot.ini file. Can you boot to an XP OS disc? You may be able to do a repair install.

I had the same problem recently and I used a Bart PE disc. It was able to repair the boot drive and it all worked again. It's handy for that type of problem as it will boot the computer even with no drives hooked up, then you can diagnose the system and make sure everything works. You can also save your files out if needed. Otherwise, it may be trial and error if it's another problem besides boot drive corruption.

You might also check in BIOS to see which drive is set for boot, and check the other BIOS settings to see if anything is messed up there.

[cowgoo]

I just had the same problem last week. I tried xp repair, reformating, swapping ram, scan disk. But from what I can tell for me, my power outage must have shorted something in the power supply. I swapped it with an older under powered one but everything appears to be working fine now