startup hangs at "starting windows" screen.. please help

G

geckoman

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 9, 2003
Messages
325
I've got an ECS nforce3-a mobo, with a brand new Raptor HDD plugged into the SATA plug.
I have a DVD R/W as Master and DVD-RAM as Slave on IDE-1
I have a WD 160gb HDD with jumper set as "master no slave present" on IDE-2

I was able to start up the PC successfully and format and partition the WD 160gb drive into 2 partitions, then did a complete backup of the Raptor drive into one of the partitions. Everything seemed to go fine.

Then, I rebooted again and it went through the normal startup stuff - detecting IDE drives (it showed the two DVD drives on IDE1, the WD160 on IDE2 and the Raptor drive on the Sata... then it goes to the black "Microsoft Windows XP" screen with the blue 'progression' bar. Then, it comes up to the blue screen "Starting Windows".. which is NORMALLY follwed by the "welcome" screen. However, it just hangs on the 'Starting Windows' screen.

If I unplug the IDE cable with the WD160 HDD, the computer starts up fine (the Raptor is the boot drive).

It's a new IDE cable (I replaced it because I thought that might have been the problem)

Is it possible that it's a problem with the mobo?

Please help!
 
On WD drives, if there is no slave present, I think you want the jumper completely off. I seem to recall having problems with that a long time ago. Someone can correct me if I'm wrong.
 
i checked it once - when it worked correctly... but since the problem started I haven't checked again... I'll check it
 
check to see if there is a newer version of the bios available. This could be a known problem on your mobo.

Also, I'd go into safe mode and re-install the MoBo drivers. Last time you installed, did you use the Nvidia IDE driver or the Windows driver? Try using the oposite of what you used last time.
 
I shut down the system last night... when I came back to it today and powered it up, it worked fine.

I really don't like 'intermittent' problems - this is gonna be a biotch to troubleshoot! I'll check the BIOS version and see if there's an update available. I do think that the last time I updated the BIOS, I chose to use the nVidia IDE driver. what would be the best way to 'undo' that?
 
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