Screen goes dark after XP boot splash screen, never finishes booting

[Brian Kendig]

Last week, my PC stopped being able to boot up. I reformatted and
reinstalled Windows from scratch, and today the problem came back
again.

It gets up to the Windows XP splash screen with the blue dots moving
from left to right, but then when the blue 'welcome' screen should
appear, it instead goes to a black screen. Within ten seconds or so all
disk activity ceases. No key presses (including Ctrl-Alt-Del) have any
effect. I let it sit for a half hour, but it never leaves the black
screen. (The monitor has sync; it's simply a black screen.)

VGA mode and Last Known Good both give me the same results. Safe Mode
gets up to "giveio.sys" before all activity stops.

The PC is built from parts: MSI Socket 939 motherboard, A64 3000+
processor, 1.5GB RAM, SATA hard drive, GeForce 6600 video. It's all
standard stuff. It's running Windows XP Home SP2. Fully up-to-date, and
the system itself is *very* lean and clean - I support PCs, I only use
this one for testing and for games.

Before the problem each time, it was working just fine. I changed
nothing about this system's configuration between the last time it
worked and the first time it didn't. I booted from my Windows UBCD and
run chkdsk on it; the drive is fine and there are no errors.

I tried booting with F8 held down, then I told it to create a boot log;
when it hanged I rebooted from the UBCD and looked for bootlog.txt on
the hard drive, but there was none.

What could be going wrong here? How can I go about finding exactly why
Windows refuses to get to the blue 'welcome' screen?

 

[thecreator]

Hi Brian,

Do you have an Anti-Virus Software package installed and running? Have
you reinstall the correct graphics drivers for this card? If yes, then the
card itself may be going bad. Replace the Graphics Card!

Also check the CPU Fan. If working replace the Graphics Card.

 

[Brian Kendig]

Do you have an Anti-Virus Software package installed and running? Have
you reinstall the correct graphics drivers for this card? If yes, then the
card itself may be going bad. Replace the Graphics Card!
Also check the CPU Fan. If working replace the Graphics Card.

Thanks for the thought - you know, I wonder if the graphics drivers
might be causing the problem. I have a GeForce 6600 and I'm running
nVidia ForceWare 91.31, to which I upgraded not long before this
problem happened the first time. Thanks for the idea!