Computer reboots continuously

My computer is a AMD Semphron 3200+ w/ 2 HDD and 2 CD-ROMS. Upon starting up windows (before the login screen), it will reboot and this happens recursively. Before rebooting, it shows a blue screen for a while but is too fast for me to see the error message.

Before this happened, my computer will suddenly hang after a while with a blue screen saying that not all hardware is connected properly or physical memory dump while just being on in windows. Occassionally, there is also a 'whirling sound' which may require me to tamper with the connections before being able to boot up, after which the sound will disappear.

Anybody has any idea what steps I should follow to troubleshoot this problem? Thanks a lot for your help.

 

Try to boot the computer using the safe boot option.

Start the computer and keep the 'F8' key pressed until you see a menu with various options.

Select the 'safe boot' option.

See if your computer still restarts. Also remember to unplug all the external devices from the computer while doing this.

Tell me what happens and then we can work on it further.

 

I have solved the problem .. it couldn't even boot up in safe mode before that so I inserted windows 2000 cd, formatted the OS partition and reinstalled everything ...
works beautifully for now .. think it was a virus that changed the MBR and Boot sector
Thanks for the help anyway

 

I doubt it was the MBR. The computer only reads the MBR so it knows what it can boot and what files to run to boot. If the MBR was at fault, it wouldn't have booted at all.

 

oic .. i thot that was the case coz it hanged during the startup screen in windows .. in your opinion, jz for curiousity, what shld the problem be then? It is definitely related to software coz the only thing I changed was the OS to make it work