Inspiron 530s Desktop - Shutting down and Restarting over & over again

Overheating? Maybe needs new thermal paste between CPU and heat sink..?

 

 

Do you get an error message before the BIOS runs after it shuts down and restarts?

It sounds like a problem I was having(I had the WD 500GB caviar blue HDD) and it had an error due to

some corrupted data. Dell has a diagnostic/program that can not be shut down(to my knowledge) that will,

as soon as your hard drive tries to access the corrupted data, shut down the system. I tried a full

reformatting of my HDD and reinstalling windows but apparently the HDD was actually damaged enough

for that to not matter.

It was quite annoying. I would boot up just fine, use my pc for 15-30 minutes then it would just shut down

without warning. Much like a system overheating, but all of the components and ambient temp were within

normal operating range. Sometimes it would get into a cycle of restarting itself over and over when it

would get to the BIOS screen. I replaced the HDD and it has not happened since.

Yes I get some error message but its too short time to read before the system gets shut down... I think replacing the hard disk is the only thing left now, I will check by plugging in another internal hard disk to see if this is the case. But thanks very much for a detailed reply, I will try that this weekend and will post my result.

Alright... replaced the HDD and nothing changed its all the same.... shutting down and restating so rapidly. I think I am done with this... this seems to me some problem with Motherboard... I don't want to spend too much money fixing it if I can get another for same price... If anyone can help that would be great otherwise have to buy a new one :(