Another long-winded story.

I came home from work and sis was showing me how the comp kept restarting itself when booting up. As it restarted at different points during the boot process, and even during POST I diagnosed it as a hardware error. I opened up the casing and found that the catch that locks the processor heat-sink and fan broke so I guess the processor was not spreading the heat fast enough. I manually tied the sink back and the computer started up.

It then loaded Windows and kept restarting again, this time at the same point. I disabled the option to auto-restart when Windows hits a critical error, and the hidden BSOD showed up. Based on the error code I found some documentation on Microsoft. However, I was unable to follow through because the first step says “At a command prompt,”. With the BSOD happening no matter what startup option I chose, I could not get the “command prompt”. I even tried Ubuntu LiveCD, Windows Recovery Console and even a Linux Registry Editor, but couldn’t fix it. So I spent a few hours last night re-installing Windows. Re-installing Windows with the drivers and applications took less time than trying to fix it.

Now I’m already used to it, having to do do re-installation every few months or so.