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Win XP gets fast blue screen and reboots constantly

I have a small PC repair business in Palm Bay, Florida, and I run into a lot of instances where Win XP boots up part of the way, gets a "really fast" blue screen and then restarts itself. It will not even get to safe mode or last known as it does the same thing. Is there a way to stop the system from restarting at the error so that it can be read? It restarts too fast to use the pause button. I see 2-3 of these issues a week and in most cases, I do a re-install to fix the system but that is a lot of work.
Enable Bootlogging by pressing F8 during startup, and choosing Enable Bootlogging from the Windows Advanced Options Menu. Bootlogging is a diagnostic feature which will lists every driver the operating system tries to load. It creates a text file named Ntdtlog.txt in the Windows directory that can be opened with Notepad. You may need to start the PC in Safe Mode or access the file via the Recovery Console to read the file. Once you have identified the driver or service causing the problem, restart the Recovery Console and remover or disable the driver.

This was first published in May 2004

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