Power loss at boot up

Friend needs help, they are running windows ME, when they try to start their computer it will start up like normal and under one minute they lose all power. We have tried to use a boot disk but system shuts down before before the process can be completed , have also tried to restore Me , with recovery disk and it also fails, so far no matter what we have tried the system will not stay running for over two minutes the best we have gotten so far is to get to the desktop loading before shut down.The tech support for the system says they have a virus on the system tried boot disk ,tried safe mode , tried just about everything and still can't seem to keep the system powered up. by the way it is 14 months old with 3 year extended part and labor , not sure what else to do except change power supply.any help would be appreciated.

 

Hi,
I'm new to this board but have been in IT for 15 years. Anyway, do you have an old DOS disk or a 95/98 boot disk? Try booting up with that. I don't know what ME uses for booting up from the floppy so I can't say whether or not you can use it. If it asks you about CD ROM's and give you an A: prompt you can use it 'cuz that's DOS. After you boot with the disk leave it alone. Don't try to access the hard drive just leave it sit. If it stays booted longer that the 2 min you have been able to than I'd say you might have a virus. If not than you have a hardware problem.
If your ME floppy forces you to start ME from the hard drive, unplug the hard drive power cable (the small one with 4 wires) and try to boot the computer. It will most likly give you an error code about the "missing" hard drive but the purpose of this is to see if the hardware is working or not, so just let it sit there powered on. If it stays on, were back to the possible virus.

Let me know how it goes.

 

Hi tamiles68, welcome to TSG......

Your problem sounds like it could be the fan on top of the cpu is not working....they can heat up very quickly....I'd check that first.

 

The system will not stay powered up no matter which drive we try to boot from , we tried to boot from a:,with boot disk try to boot from cd recovery disk to restore windows to original configuration but still the power shuts down . If you let it try to start up you barely get to the windows splash screen before it shuts down, we have gotten to the windows desktop once before power loss and thats it even trying to run the systems recovery cd that came with the system and tried to format and reinstall whole systems os. it still shuts the power off have even tried unplugging the power so the power supply switch could reset itself, any other ideas. also , was told by another tech that even if cpu's fan wasn't working it should still boot up all the way , help no clue

 

Some CPUs have temperature sensors......it really is worth taking a peak at it.........