How do you removed a virus that keeps rebooting your computer even after reinstalling WinXP Pro and formatting the hard drive?

Answer 1

If you've reformatted and reinstalled XP, it's extremely unlikely that it's a virus.

The first thing to try is to run in Safe Mode and see if the machine will stay up. You may have some bad drivers that you're re-installing with Windows.

You may have a thermal problem. Load up Motherboard Monitor (http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=311) and verify that your CPU isn't overheating. If it is, check that the CPU fan is running and that the heatsink is making good contact with the CPU surface (you also need to make sure that there's some sort of contact medium like thermal paste or one of those cheap stick-on pads. Bare metal to bare metal doesn't work well with modern CPUs)

Next, try using a tool like SiSoft Sandra to burnin your hardware. Honestly, I have had very little luck finding real hardware problems with sandra, but it works well for driver and configuration problems. It's certainly one of the better tools for verifying that a problem has gone away. http://www.sisoftware.net/

A good standalone test tool is Tufftest Pro. There is a freeware version called Tufftest Lite available at http://www.tufftest.com/free.htm. This one works great on real hardware problems, but is useless for config or driver issues. Sandra and Tufftest together cover a pretty wide range of problems.

You may have your BIOS settings set too aggressively. A lot of motherboards have the equivalent of a "safe mode" for the bios settings. Look in your motherboard manual and see if you can find something. You can also try just reverting to defaults (write down your current settings before doing this, though)

If it's a hardware issue, your most likely culprit is some memory that's going bad. Until Windows actually uses the marginal area, it runs fine. But once it gets to that bad spot your programs will crash or Windows will simply reboot. Even a lot of brand new machines ship with marginal memory. Tufftest should find this. If you have more than one stick of memory, leave just one in and see if the machine is stable. Rotate the sticks out until you find one that's causing problem.

You could have a problem card in the machine. Try running with any extraneous cards removed (like a network or sound card). If it's stable, add the cards back in until it isn't.

I hope that this gives you some ideas for locating the problem.