Old pentium 3

My friends given my this old pentium 3 to have a look at because it has a problem with it, i was wondering if you guys could help. The computer boots up sort of, it gets to the WinXP loading screen and then just restarts itself It does this over and over again.....
I took out the hard drive and tried it in 3 old pc's as a slave and they all came up with the blue screen 'beginning physical memory dump'
Any ideas whats wrong??

 

Tried a different harddisk in it? Sounds as though the disk is hosed and the installation is crapped. Try a reformat, if it's still buggered try a new disk.
If it blue screens with an 8 character HEX then it's a memory error, if it's a page fault in non paged it's an IO or memory error.

 

I think the more pressing question is: why are you running XP on a P3?

Edit: Ok, it's not a pressing question.

 

ozstriker, thats hardly a pressing question. The later Tualatins run XP just fine. Sounds like a buggered install to me; either by the install itself or the hard drive. Do what bindi said and it should work again

 

Hmm, sounds like a borked install or driver problems

does it boot succesfuly in safe mode ?

 

No, safemode doesn't boot. Im trying to reinstall windows on it now, but im getting problems. When windows is installing it keep saying '**** file was not copied correctly'

 

Sounds like the drive could be screwed then, if it's failing at copying files.

 

I agree with the dead harddrive.

You could always run memtest to check the ram as well, diagnostics always help.

 

Have you tried using a diff IDE cable..?

 

I have this same problem, except worse. I put the messed up drive into another computer, and it said it was unformatted. Then when I tried to put a drive with win2k on it already into the messed up pc, it wouldn't boot and screwed up another hard drive! Now I've got 2 computers that don't work. Im still trying to fix it though, Ill post here if I can repair it.

 

My guess: The capacators are fried. If you open the case and find some brownish looking goo (probably crusty) then you have bad caps, and need to replace them. I have an msi mobo in my closet with this same problem but I havent gotten around to getting new capacators.
You can probably find more info to help you diagnose on http://badcaps.net/

 

lizard.boy, these dont sound like a symptom of capacitor issues - and the P3 era ended before the capacitor plague.

 

Not necessarily. My i815 mobo died of capacitor leakage.