WIndows XP Boot Hang

B

BellaCroix

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2004
Messages
1,054
Hello all, was hoping someone might be able to point me in the right direction to fix a minor annoyance my new build keeps encountering on boot.

This machine is running Windows XP Home Edition, SP2 was slipstreamed in the install. All updates are current. The build is a watercooled (no overclock) Athlon 64 on an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I'm running 2 gig if Corsair LL RAM, 1 XFX 7900 GT, 2 WD 250gig HDDs (No RAID), and Soundblaster Audigy card.

When I cold boot the PC, especially if it's been off a while, POST completes with no problems, all drives are detected and loaded, it begins to load Windows XP then hangs on the loading screen. The blue "laoding" bar continues to scroll but the HDD indicator light stays on (no flashing or blinking) and it never completes the load. If I crash out of the load by holding down the power button (there's no reset switch on this case) then relaod everything works fine about 99% of the time after getting through the "Windows failed to load on the last attempt" black screen.


Any suggestions or recommendations?

Thanks in advance!
 
Sounds like your HD is going bad.

I just had this problem with a computer I worked on. It started out exactly how you described your problem, but then got worse to where it'd do it on every single boot.

I'd turn it on and it's post fine. But after post it'd sit htere for a couple seconds before a progress bar would pop up and slowly fill up. It'd finish after about 30-seconds and then load the XP boot screen and it seemed to go on forever. After about five times of this I though I'd try to see if it was actually doing anything. It took well over an hour to get to the log on screen.

So I downloaded the hard drive diagnostics tools and ran the complete "burn-in" test on the drive. It never read one failed sector, but it was only reading about 500-1000k/sec in a lot of areas of the media. Then it'd be really fast for other areas. So I made the assumption that the media was failing and replaced the drive and the problem went away.
 
I'll have to give that a try... the HDD is brand new so if that is the problem (although I'm hesitant to think it is) at least it'll be under warranty. This drive doesn't even have 150 hrs on it yet... after the problems I had getting a A8N32 that wasn't screwed I really hope the drive isn't a bad one.

Thanks for the suggestion... looks like I have a project tomorrow.

Anyone else have ideas?
 
What kind of motherboard do you have? I have exactly the same problem and I'm using the Dual Sata2 board. I suspect its a board level problem. Tried putting SATA drive into IDE mode, etc but have had no joy.

I would be interested he knowing if you ever find a solution. I'm tempted just to buy a cheap nvidia chipset based motherboard.
 
I had this exact same problem and it was driving me NUTS as my hard drive and most of my machine was brand-new.

Turned out to be that I plugged in my old firewire Ipod dock to sync up and when I rebooted - it wouldn't load windows with it plugged in.

Unplugged the firewire and immediately booted up fine.

YMMV.
 
ryan_975 said:
Sounds like your HD is going bad
Click to expand...
Yep, it sounds like it's not spinning up correctly right away. You can easily run the diags to be sure.
 
yea depending on your motherboard it will try and boot from USB devices/firewire so you gotta unplug them all till xp loads up
 
I had the same problem too. It was fixed by uninstalling some nVidia's IDE drivers that were installed by hitting yes on a prompt while installing my mobo drivers. I got rid of them, used Window's default and it worked perfectly after that. My hard drive is SATA too.
 
The board is an Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe. I had a ton of problems with this build because of bad motherboards straight from the box.

If this annoyance is the only thing I've still got left, I guess I can live with it. It doesn't happen that often and once I hard reboot, get through the warning message, it always starts fine the second time around.

I don't think it's overheating since it never happens on a warm-reboot, only a cold start.

Drive diagnostic doesn't show any problems.

I think I remember someone saying there was some way to not display the "Loading Windows..." screen and instead see some kind of list of what file is being loaded at that moment. If I could figure out what device, application, .dll or whatever was loading at the exact moment the system hanged I could better understand what was happening. Anyone know of a way to do that?
 
Sometimes having 2 SATA drives connected will cause this problem. It's some stupid issue with mobo drivers for SATA RAID being used even when RAID isn't on.

Here's how I fixed the issue. I disconnected my non-primary HDD when my system was booting. Installed my updates and whatnot, and then reconnected the drive. No issues since.
 
Yes, like service packs, hot fixes, etc. I find that there is far less trouble in doing a fresh install and then applying all my extra drivers and updates than there is in doing them all at once.

It takes more time, but it less of a headache.
 
Hello,

I had a similar problem, only more severe- Windows wouldn't start on regular basis, usually once a week, with system repair as the only way to overcome it. After running into it again yesterday I tried the solution Darknyt proposed, unplugging half of my firewire; the next re-boot was successful, and the problem didn't occur since. Thanks a lot!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top