My father's computer issue

[SithFran]

Not sure what happened but my dad's computer went on the fritz. He has Win2k on there, AMD 1.3Ghz, 128MB ram, 80GB hard drive. When I saw it the other day I was able to get it to start up and tried running AVG on it. It was very slow and found nothing. When I restarted the computer it wouldn't go past the start-up screen. It'll just keep looping from the initial start up, show the black Win2k screen, go to the white windows screen with the blue bar at the bottom. Once the blue bar fills up it cycles back to the beginning.

When I have it run through safe mode the same thing will happen. I'm at a loss as I had it up the first time. Any ideas what I can do before taking it in to some data doctor type place? I would just like to be able to get their pictures and stuff off the machine then I can reformat or get them a new system. And no, he never backed anything up. I'm thinking their SOL.

Any ideas? Thanks.

 

[Lice]

Maybe try pulling the HD out and hooking it to your computer?

 

[ravenbear]

I agree with Lice, you should yank the hd and see what you can recover from it.

mainly bumping you back to the top as someone more knowledgable may see and help you out.

 

[Davideo]

Sounds like there is a hardware problem... for safety reasons the computer when it is doing its initial tests is stopping/restarting. Probably a bad stick of ram? I cracked a motherboard once when replacing a CPU, it did the same thing. Fun stuff trying to diagnose the actual issue. Best thing is to pull everything out, and put it back in one at a time (or the otherway around).