computer "boot/shutdown loop" by itself

Hello, my computer is broken lol

Last night it started a strange ritual.

1)boot
2)wait 2 seconds
3)shutdown
4)go to step 1

It wake me up and I had to remove battery to make it stop

My theory: yesterday I was messing around with virtualization software and corrupted the partition where I installed all my programs and since it was late I shut it down to go to sleep there must have been some error which caused it not to shutdown completely and go monkeypoo.

What I cannot explain is the "loop" and why it waited the middle of the night to start...

Do you guys think my hardware is broken or it was just software related ?
any useful comment to prevent this again ?
did some of you already experienced this ?

 

is this windows xp?
If its windows xp it sounds like a drive letter problem.
the paragon rescue kit free edition bootcd might be able to help you there. Also you an try booting into safe mode and delete the virtualation hardware.

From my understanding how windows works, during bootup windows looks for the startup files in a particular partition, if that partition drive letter has changed, it will not find the startup files and will reboot itself and go into an endless loop.

I fix this problem on xp with the paragon rescue kit "boot corrector", so it is fixable. good luck.

It is definitely a software problem (windows to be precise), your hardware is fine.

 

I preferred to reinstall windows and restore a backup of my personal files because the system might have been unstable because the partition where I installed all the programs has been corrupted.

I read on another forum that it might have been a driver that corrupted the memory of the shutdown process and caused it to do that weird ****. no idea if that is possible and makes sense .