Hardware or Windowes Problem

[Termite2914]

Using XP Pro, yesterday windows could not see my cd rom and dvd burner. In device manager it stated they were working, but the system could not find the hardware (with the yellow exclamation point.) I deleted and let XP find the hardware again which usually solves these problems. Anyway, no luck. Found new hardware, but the same result. I found it strange that both devices went bad at the same time. Thought maybe the SATA or IDE Bus went bad.

 

Today, windows starts to boot but before the blue welcome screen it reboots. Same thing every time. Tried safe boot, last good...same problem.

 

I suspect it is a hardware problem, but don;t know where to begin or how to troubleshoot. Has anyone had this problem? Power supply in BIOS appears to show normal power output. Motherboard? Processor? Any help to get this machine back up would be appreciated.

[Jamey]

Best plan in this situation is to disconnect everything except from your main hard drive, a single stick of RAM, power supply and graphics card. This should let you boot into Windows without rebooting. The procedure is to then add one piece of hardware back at a time, rebooting each time to see if it makes a difference.