Comp resets on startup

[KillerPotato]

Hey everyone. I've just starting having problems on my main desktop and now whenever I try to startup my computer, it will do its normal stuff, and when it gets to the windows XP screen with the blue running load bar and the Win XP logo, it'll show that for a while and then just reset and run in an infinite loop.

It started like an hour ago when I was getting little popup notices from my taskbar that a few folders from a slave drive were corrupt and unreadable and it kept telling me to run DiskChkr or something that sounded like that with no vowels in the second word, and I tried to open them and I would get an error message. Subfolders of the said unreadable directories were still readable though, so I decided to just restart my computer and see where I could go from there. And then I ran into the restarting loop problem I described earlier.

If I try to start in safe mode, it will still reset itself at a point in the loading process, and if I try to start from the last known good configuration, the same thing will happen. I'm sort of stuck at this point, and if anyone can give me suggestions, thanks in advance. I'll keep posting as I find stuff out / try new stuff.

My comp's specs

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1gb Corsair 3200 Value RAM (512x2)
ASUS mobo
ATI X800XL
Antec Truepower 550W
System HD: 60gb Seagate
Slave 1: 80gb WD
Slave 2: 250gb Maxtor (running through an IDE card)

It's the maxtor that was having the corrupted file warning popping up from my taskbar. Any suggestions appreciated. Thx again if anyone can help

 

[lilbstrd]

You might try booting to the XP cd and using the recovery console or repair windows options.

 

[tuskenraider]

Get memtest and run it for a couple of passes to see if you get any errors.

 

[digital_exhaust]

Try booting from a Knoppix live cd, and see how that goes. That will usually eliminate hardware as the problem.

If I had to guess, I'd say you might have a psu that's preparing to die.. but that's just a guess.

 

[KillerPotato]

Thx for the replies all. Well, soon after I first posted I found out that the system booted up fine when I simply unplugged my 250gb HDD. So I got a PowerMax bootup disk and ran tests on that HDD and it said it failed all of them (lol), but I just told it to reformat it and so far its working fine again, just lost like 90% of my games, movies, porn, etc, but no big. Like, I have a feeling its going to fail for good soon so I'm going to shimmy along with the way things are for now, and just try not to put critical school files on it and stuff. Thanks again for the suggestions. I forgot to come back and check before I fixed the problem, but if it ever happens again, I'll know where to find the solution.