[jet8300]

My brother's pc has XP Home on it, and this is the second time since I built the computer a month ago that windows has gotten stuck in a boot loop. It won't boot into safe mode either. The last time I fixed it running chkdsk found some errors and I repaired the mbr and the boot sector. Then it just booted right up. I bought burnintest and ran the snot out of that and it didn't find any problems. I also ran complete seagate diagnostics tests, all the tests pass. Plus I fully ran memtest+86 twice. Never finding any errors.

So my question is not how to fix the boot loop, but what in the heck is causing this to happen? How do I figure this out? I don't want to but I was going to just format the drive and start fresh again to try that.

[PK-her0]

i dont know...i just dont trust memory testers that much...i have tested ram with memtest and it said passed but the ram was faulty and swapping it out sorted the problem. there again you could have a problem with the board. maybe cables to drives etc

[jet8300]

This seems to actually have been solved by replacing the SATA cable. This is the second time I've found a problem caused by an SATA cable. Until recently I never would have suspected such a thing could be bad, but I guess it makes sense.