XP Pro hangs on Start up

Software & Apps
#1

Goodaye all…

I have reformatted a couple of times XP PRO SP2. It reboots and restarts everytime during the day, no probs.

But switch it off at night and the next morning it hangs when it gets to the loading point where the white line goes across the bottom of the screen …Then after I press the restart button, it starts up okay. It gets to the F8 page and after the 30 second delay where it says start window normally…it starts up with no problems for the rest of the day…

I can even switch it off during the day for a couple of hours and it restarts perfectly…

I have tried boot sector virus scans (no probs) and I have set up the boot sequence the same as my other machine. I have only one 80gb HDD and a floppy plus a LG DVD burner as hardware.

Is it possible it’s losing its start up memory somewhere overnight? Geez I don’t want to reformatt again!!

#2

I can get that problem when there is a flakey power connection to a drive. Try new connections or just reseating and cleaning.

#3

That happened to my brothers computer, after about a week of head scratching we discovered the power supply was low when the computer was cold causing the instability and startup problems. An new larger power supply solved the problem.
Do you have alot of usb devices that use the system to power them plugged in? if so try unplugging a few before a cold boot.
Also check that your motherboard battery isn’t getting flat. That can make the bios lose its settings and stop the first boot of the day. Then on the restart the bios redetects the cpu speed, then sets the rest of the bios to its default settings.Which may be enough to load windows sucessfully.Once the computer has been going for a while the motherboard battery gets a rest so will keep the bios state ok for a few hours after being turned off. Then over night the battery gets too flat,the bios settings are lost and the process starts all over again when you switch on in the morning.

#4

Don’t forget the older drives cold spin up times of the HDD’s. If your bios is faster then your drives it will crash. The bios timing can be set to account for this but a slow spinup is also a sign of a drive past it’s prime. I have a very old 60 gig drive (one of 3)and if I shut the system off and let the room get cold it takes a few minutes for this drive to spin up to working speed. I plan on replacing it with a 300 gig or larger as soon as I see a deal without rebates.

#5

Thanks Drifternz.
Its sounds logical. How do you replace a battery that I didn’t know I had?. Tomorrow morning 23rd, I am going to take a movie of boot up so that I can slow mo the flash of a blue screen that came up today just before it rebooted itself… It had a whole heap of writing on it but it was so quick I couldn’t read it.
I am willing to try anything… before I boot it out the door!!!

#6

All motherboards carry a 3 volt ‘coin’ battery to keep the cmos alive whilst the board is powered down. The life of the battery is around 5 years, so if your board is only 2 years old it’s unlikely to be that.
Hard drives on the other hand are well known to be slow starters when cold or becoming faulty. (Bearings or dried out lubrication leading to total failure.)
You will have to refer to the motherboard manual or take the battery out to discover the exact type fitted. (2032,2430 etc) if you have to replace it. It is a very easy task but you will have to reset all your prefs in bios afterwards.
Regards

#7

thanks weedougie
I have replaced the battery tonight.(3V 2032) will try it again in the morning (24th). It played up again during this mornings boot up but the blue screen didn’t flash this time, so I guess its going to be trial and error… thanks for the suggestions.

#8

I agree with weedougie… had similar problem to you, Seven of Nine…couple of years back. A techie told me to image the drive if I could get it to boot and then go buy a new drive. He was right. I managed to get the drive to boot 3 more times and then…SPLOT!!! Dead!
Thank god for imaging software…new drive was up and running within the hour…phew!
Resistance is futile![I]

#9

so it hangs when you start up eh. well boot in safe mode and try to scan for viruses and spyware if that doesn’t work i think you need a new clean install of windows xp. do not use the same disc try dling a new one thats not the same and installing it. i did this last week and they said it was a registory error thats why it hangs

#10

Thanks guys,

I put a new battery in last night and this morning it was worse…! Took 4 goes to flash up…(I took down the bios settings before and just reset them the same)…But I managed to take a movie of it and I will look at the flash of the blue screen tonight in slow mo… The drive is only 2 years old. So I don’t want to buy another one just yet. I am thinking it may be a motherboard solder crack ? which cools off overnight and when it warms up its okay? That’ll be a shop’s job to check I reckon… Geez it could be anything but I am going to keep working on it…Thanks for your suggestions and input so far…I will need all the help I can get! LOL

#11

It could quite well be a crack, rotten solder acts in a similar way and you just need one small drip to fail and your tearing your hair out trying to figure out the problem.

Before going to any shop, take all cables, cards, memory and CPU out of your M/B and then re-seat them, if’s it a bad connection there (these things do wiggle out over time) then this might solve it, but If you do think it’s the M/B then can I suggest you buy a new one, as all the repair shop is going to do is look at the board, confirm it’s on it’s way out and tell you to buy a new one, so save yourself a few bucks and cut out the middle man :slight_smile:

#12

Took a screen shot from a slo mo this morning… I will try and set the bios and see what happens tomorrow morning… Unless someone can read this and give some other suggestions. Ive compressed it a bit but it should work.

XP Hang Up.doc (156 KB)

#13

Got some weird XP Pro problems as well.
Seems to run REALLY slowly at times, but it seems to be when I´ve been online for a while (geno888 may have noticed I´m slow at responding to him sometimes!).
I´ve got AntiVir running all the time, Antispy and regular MS protection levels, and ran CCleaner a few days ago.
Sometimes my connection kicks me off (but maybe cos I´m using UMTS), and I have to restart, in which case it works fine again for a while.
A buddy suggested I may have to do a clean re-install, but my laptop didn´t come with any discs.
Not sure what to do about that…revert to my old system maybe…?


#14

@Seven of Nine: All you can see is the standard windows user friendly BSOD that doesn’t tell you much, but it’s been a while since I saw one, so I can’t remember if the juicy info is at the bottom (which is blured out on the photo).

@deanimator, yeah it looks like you need a clean install. Go to your manufactors site and all the drivers you need should be there (you also need a copy of XP, but thats a different matter :slight_smile: )

#15

Petera… I have written the words on the blue screen.

" A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computor.

If this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen restart your computor. If this screen appears again follow these steps.

Check to be sure you have adequate disk space. If a driver is identified in the stop message, disable the driver or check with the manufacturer for driver updates. Try changing video adapters.

Check with your hardware vendor for any BIOS updates. Disable BIOS primary options such as caching or shadowing. If you need to use ??? mode to remove or disable components, restart your computor, press F8 to select start up options and then select safe mode.

Technical Information…"

I am going to disable the caching and shadowing and see what its like on start up tomorrow… Gees it may well be that this screen has nothing to do with the problem anyway !!!

Thanks guys…

#16

Thanks for all the suggestions guys but I can’t get the fkn thing to go roper. My HDD shit itself today so I am taking the advice (of that well known chinese fellow)… I will take my plastic and go to the shop and cannibilise what I have left… The rest will be history and scrap metal…You may close this thread…cause I give up…LOL… :sad:

#17

Hello all… just to let you all know what happened…Took the box to the shop and the tech took the cover off… He started laughing !!.. I did tell him what was happening first… but he immediately saw that about 12 capacitors were stuffed.!! yep… they looked fine to me untill I took a closer look… The four that were still okay were flat and silver on the top… ALL the others were silver on top but they were cone shaped… He reckons I should have heard them pop… He said the amount of damage could have been done over a year period… Which fits in with all the ‘gliches’ I’ve been getting.

He pointed to the ones that regulate the power supply to the drives and the video…He was very surprised that it actually booted up at all…

So thanks guys. take some comfort that you were all in the ball park with the ‘flakey power supply’ ect… I suppose its hard without actually knowing what I am looking at… I do know now though… So if anyone has the same problems…(including bsod) check the mother board for burnt out capacitors…I at least now know what to look for…

A new mother board… scrubbed drives and I’m back in business… Great !!.

#18

Hi Seven of Nine.
Glad to see that the problem is at last tracked down. :bigsmile:
As a matter of interest did you take the opportunity to upgrade while you were at it?
Regards.

#19

Great to hear you got to the bottom of it.
I would never of thought of the caps, it’s happened on motherboards I’ve looked at, but none of them have ever powered up, so I’m just as surprised as the man in the shop!

#20

Hi, Seven of nine ,
i,m running xp pro sp3 AS rock p4s61 m, board
I,m having the exact same problem as you with restarts at the first switch on of the day , ive reformatted , restored , and changed the battery on the motherboard and still having no luck,
Its 3 years since your fault and i was hoping you had it sorted , and if so could you tell me what you did ?

Cheers
Frez