PC not booting past splash screen?

BlackScarletLove

Status:In Post-Production
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I used to leave my pc on 24/7 but since hydro got so expensive now i shut it down when i leave in the morning and when i go to bed. Lately it has been having problems booting up. Sometimes it will hang for a really long time on the splash screen which gives you options for bios, etc. (like, 4 minutes, where it usually only takes a few seconds) Sometimes it will boot up fine. Sometimes it will boot up, and then my system will gradually freeze up, like, my firefox will get the spinning wheel, then my taskbar, then task manager, and ctrl-alt-delete won't work, and all i can do is press hard reset. the worst of times, it hangs on the splash screen and doesn't boot whatsoever. I have to give it sometimes multiple hard resets before it will finally boot.
I am concerned. I am thinking that since there are issues actually booting past the mobo, and the system sometimes freezes, I am concerned that there may be a problem with my C: HDD?

That being said, I have both Win 7 and XP on this pc on different drives, and when it freezes, it doesn't even allow me to get as far as to select what drive to boot into, which it will always do after the splash screen.

Does anyone know what could be going on?

Thanks.

--
Operating System
Windows 7 Ultimate (x64) Service Pack 1 (build 7601)
Windows XP SP3

Processor
3.20 gigahertz Intel Core i5-3470
128 kilobyte primary memory cache
1024 kilobyte secondary memory cache
6144 kilobyte tertiary memory cache
64-bit ready
Multi-core (4 total)
Not hyper-threaded

Board:
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. H77M-D3H
Bus Clock: 100 megahertz

BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. F5 03/29/2012

RAM:
Slot 'ChannelB-DIMM0' has 8192 MB

Display:
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 [Display adapter]
Samsung SyncMaster [Monitor] (24.0"vis, s/n YCUYHVDZ702086, July 2010)

Audio:
NVIDIA High Definition Audio
VIA High Definition Audio
 
Well have you run any software to check the health of the drive/'s? Try unhooking one then boot and see what happens, swap which one is unhooked and repeat. Though it sounds like it could be a drive failing as I had a 1TB WD Green drive and it slowed my boot time a lot.

That said it could also be power issue as could cause the issues.

Sorry not much help but never really encountered this issue myself
 
Could also be your Nvidia drivers as there are issues with Win 7/XP and 500/600 series cards with any driver newer than 314.22.

314.22 driver for Win 7 64

Would also check you CMOS battery and run manufactures drive tests.
 
ill try chkdsk first. should i do it from safe mode, regular windows, or a recovery console?
 
ok interesting -- i forgot that I did this. i dont have two separate boot drives. I partitioned one TB into 3 different parts. One install of XP, one of 7, and the other misc storage.
How would I perform a chkdksk on the whole drive?

Also, it seems that I can't boot from my DVD rom. When I open the boot menu it gives me the options shown in the attached file. Interestingly, all of them lead to the same result: the dialog that asks me to choose which OS I want to boot into. I wonder why that is? The DVD rom is perfectly accessible from within windows.

:S
 

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seagate.
the reason i wonder is because i thought you couldn't check a system drive while it was running the system -- 'in use' sort of conflict. no?

edit:
ok so i dl'd seatools, and I'm running it and I see a 'fail' notification here:

Capture.jpg


but I am not sure of which drive this is. I have multiple external drives. can i somehow use this 'model number' to associate it with its certain drive letter or name?
 
Last edited:
Well you've narrowed down the issue with your system hanging at boot I wager. I bet if you either unhook or power down the externals it will boot normally.

Once you've confirmed it boots fine then hook up one external and boot it see what happens then swap which one is hooked up and see what happens.

I'm guessing the first external listed which is the one that failed in Seatools is your problem. As to which drive that one is try using the disk management under computer management in windows at the bottom it should list all the drives connected to the system and on the left side of that screen it shows disk 0 etc basic size and if you right click on that go to properties it provides what appears to be serial number
 
Ditto, external drives have caused me similar problems at boot time.
Unplug them one at a time, see when the system starts working well again. It could be the cable, USB port or the external drive enclosure. My front USB jacks are getting twitchy about recognizing my external drives.
 
Okay so there was a hard drive that long ago retired -- couldn't plug it in without Windows saying 'drive has malfunctioned' so i wrote it off. forgot that the external drive still was switched on. traced the seagate errors to that drive, switched it off -- no problems with booting anymore :)
 

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Any of the SP crew still out there?
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