[RESOLVED] Intermittent boot problem

[Dickster]

Hi all, it's been a while since I lasted posted, because I haven't had any PC problems for, like, years...until a week ago when my PC hung during boot. It got just past the Windows XP screen (with the moving blue bar) and then would hang (blank screen, no disc drive noise) before starting the desktop. It did this a couple of times in a row. I was able to start up in Safe mode and didn't see any problems in the device manager, so I tried a normal boot again. Same hang occured. Then on about the fifth try it suddenly booted normally. I scheduled chkdsk to run on the XP partition and rebooted. It found some disk errors (flashed by too fast to read the details) and booted normally. Aha, problem solved, I thought. And it did run fine for the next week.

Yesterday my wife said it took around five tries to boot up again, but today it booted on the first try. Strange. So what could it be? The system is about five years old, so it is getting a bit creaky.

System details:

Homebuilt PC, SOYO mobo, AMD XP3000 processor, 1GB ram, Nvidia 6600GT video, Turtle Beach Riviera sound, Win XP with SP2

[Train]

What power supply do you have?

[Dickster]

Thermaltake 430W

[jdc2000]

I'd try running chkdsk again. If more errors are found, the hard drive may be starting to fail. You might also check the drive's S.M.A.R.T. status using SpeedFan or another free utility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compari...M.A.R.T._tools

[Dickster]

OK, I downloaded Speedfan (cool) and both my hard drives passed SMART testing. I'll set chkdsk to run for the next boot-up.

[Dickster]

I'm going to call this resolved. Last Friday my network adapter quit working, so I swapped it with a spare and haven't had any booting problems since. I'm guessing it was a hardware fault.

[Train]

I agree, they will cause problems. Thanks for the update.