Daughters XP machine

[bogart]

I've been lumbered with fixing it. Problem is it does continous reboots. gets to start loading window XP then get a blue secreen for an instant that mentions something about an unmountable boot disk. It will then reboot. What i find odd is that after each reboot the clock loses one hour without fail. Nothing else in the bios setup alters just the hour figure. Minutes and seconds are fine. Tried safe mode etc all the same just reboots.
The unmountable bit throws me as it does start to boot and never seen the hour thing before.
All ideas gratefully received.
Thanks

[scaryjim]

My best bet would be some kind of boot virus, followed by a corruption of the bootloader. If you have your Windows XP disk still you could boot off that and try using the built-in repair tools. I've sorted a couple of XP machines with similar problems in the past. Have to say the clock resetting is a bit of an odd one though...

You can probably do something with this using Linux live CDs too, but it's been several years since I last did that so I'm horribly out of date - best to let someone else make suggestions if that's appropriate

[jim]

Try UBCD4Win and run a few virus checks and disk checks on it, that would be my course of action.

[bogart]

Ended up connecting it to another machine, where chkdsk wanted to run. Removed all data the let chkdsk run. Seemed to find a few things it wasn't too keen on. After it had done its business disk seems ok. System boots fine. Odd thing was def HDD at fault as the odd timing of the system clock happened on the second machine also.