When I turn on my computer, it boots, it shows the IBM screen, and then it will go to the Windows XP loading screen. then it will click, and go to the IBM screen, and then go to the Windows XP loading screen, and then click – over and over and over.
Sometimes it will do that “Choose mode - safe, safe w/ net, normal” etc.
I formatted the drive, hoping that would do it.
When trying to reinstall windows XP, towards the end, it - yep, you guessed it - clicked and started over.
Is my computer broken forever? has anyone else experienced this? can you point me towards a good resource?
I hate to tell you this, but I think you need a new system board. IBM got a bunch of bad parts, and those parts made it onto a bunch of system boards. No matter what OS you install, when it gets to the point of loading and trying to init the hardware it will reboot. The best thing to do is take the PC to where you purchased it if it is still in warrenty. If it isn’t in warrenty give IBM a call to see if your model was affected, and if it is if they will give you an RMA for a new board. I know for a fact that the Netvista 6578s suffer from this problem. We have replaced upwards of 50 system boards here at work because of this problem.
Try booting up without any extra hardwares like network cards, sound cards, firewire cards, video capture cards. Everything except the graphics card…
Sometimes hardware can get in conflict with each other and choose not to boot up (or even refuse to install an OS on a HDD).
This happened to me once and i just removed all the hardware, when you do it make sure that you are grounded or touched a grounded object, you don’t want things to be destroy b/c static electricity
There may or may not be a recall on this part… Let me do a little digging on IBMs site. It is a problem they are aware of, and the PCs here are about two years old as well… Are you sure it only had a 2 year warrenty? Some PCs have 3 years… It would be worth the call to IBM to find out. (I don’t think formatting the drive voids the warrenty. I know it doesn’t on the business PCs, but I am not sure about the home use ones.)
here’s the deal Niann (and thanks for your input so far. :D):
I bought it just over a year ago (well my dad did, for my B-day)
I got it two days from now
For almost a year, it’s been working fine
I called - and Yes, my warranty is done. costs me 35$ for a service call thing, just for them to tell me somethings wrong, no doubt. sigh I’m gonna call around, see if any of my friends have run into this. No more hero formatting for me. Lmao.
PM me the serial number and the model number, I will call IBM channel support, and ask them if they know if this was a model that could have been part of the faulty system board problem.
