Ok, so a few days ago, my parents' computer was stricken by some sort of malfunction. This is the problem -- their computer started to reboot spontaneously. They tried to run virus scanners, to no avail; it seemed that they would run to about 98% completion or so, then the computer would restart again. The screen began to show several tiny blue dots scattered sporadically across the screen, each about 1 pixel big. So they tried to reinstall windows, and the install crashed just before it asked her for time zone and cd key information. Weird thing about that is that when she tried to restart, the Win XP splash screen would show those sporadic blue dots once again, then it would reboot by itself.
I figured it was some sort of virus, so I decided to boot the computer from a bootable windows cd and just start anew with the hard drive. I deleted the old partition using FDISK and made a new one, then formatted it (the long way) and tried to reinstall windows. Much to my surprise, most of the same errors persisted, and the blue dots on the screen would still show up, although the computer was no longer restarting spontaneously.
Has anyone ever heard of something like this? Could this possibly be a virus that could somehow circumvent a partition and hard drive erasure? This happened right about the time ZOTOB was hitting computers, but these don't seem like ZOTOB symptoms at all. Any ideas???
Oh btw, the computer is an eMachines system with Win XP home and that is the only hard drive in the computer.