hang during boot

[Jim]

I have a windows 2000 machine with all the latest service
packs and security updates etc.. As long as I can
remember, it has always hung on the first boot for the day
and successful on the second, successive try. Recently,
it began hanging on every boot, even multiple times a day
if tried, yet still successful on the second try. Its
annoying. I defragged, scandisk, ran a repair
with "emergency repair disk", changed out the harddrive.
Nothing seems to rid me of this nuisance. Any of your
experts out there have any additional ideas?

It has a 400Mhz AMDK62 processor, but fast enough for what
I do at home. Has a slave harddrive for all the digital
photos. Other than that, nothing fancy.

Thanks in advance and sorry about the long post.

 

[rach]

I have a windows 2000 machine with all the latest service
packs and security updates etc.. As long as I can
remember, it has always hung on the first boot for the day
and successful on the second, successive try. Recently,
it began hanging on every boot, even multiple times a day
if tried, yet still successful on the second try. Its
annoying. I defragged, scandisk, ran a repair
with "emergency repair disk", changed out the harddrive.
Nothing seems to rid me of this nuisance. Any of your
experts out there have any additional ideas?

It has a 400Mhz AMDK62 processor, but fast enough for what
I do at home. Has a slave harddrive for all the digital
photos. Other than that, nothing fancy.

Thanks in advance and sorry about the long post.

I have a laptop that hangs on reboots. All reboots it hangs at, but cold
starts it works fine. With 98/ME/NT4 no problems, but with 2K or XP it hangs
always at reboot. I've searched for the answer and have asked many places
like here, but no one knows why.

It's a Celeron 433 clone. At power down it sits at the "It's now safe to
turn off your computer" screen too BTW.

Good luck.

Rach

 

[Guest]

Interesting, Rach. I hope someone can help us. I forgot
to mention that mine doesn't shutdown. You can
select 'shutdown' or 'restart' and both of them yield
a 'restart'. I wonder if that tyes into the hang on
boot....

 

[Jim]

Hi, Sorry to hear you have a similar problem. I'm hoping
some of the experts here will help us.

fyi, my 2000 machine also doesn't 'shutdown'. Whatever
option you choose (shutdown or restart) upon turning off
the computer, it will 'restart' everytime. Not sure if
that is a related problem or not.....

Jim

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

I have a windows 2000 machine with all the latest service
packs and security updates etc.. As long as I can
remember, it has always hung on the first boot for the day
and successful on the second, successive try. Recently,
it began hanging on every boot, even multiple times a day
if tried, yet still successful on the second try. Its
annoying. I defragged, scandisk, ran a repair
with "emergency repair disk", changed out the harddrive.
Nothing seems to rid me of this nuisance. Any of your
experts out there have any additional ideas?

It has a 400Mhz AMDK62 processor, but fast enough for what
I do at home. Has a slave harddrive for all the digital
photos. Other than that, nothing fancy.

Thanks in advance and sorry about the long post.

Intermittent boot failures are in the vast majority of all
cases the result of temperature-dependent hardware
problems. Since you gave no indication at all how far
your boot sequence progresses, it's hard to say anything
else in your particular case.

 

[Terabyte]

I have a windows 2000 machine with all the latest service
packs and security updates etc.. As long as I can
remember, it has always hung on the first boot for the day
and successful on the second, successive try. Recently,
it began hanging on every boot, even multiple times a day
if tried, yet still successful on the second try. Its
annoying.

I have a Compaq P2/300 laptop that has the same problem with hanging
on the restart with Win2K. The initial boot is fine. I am beginning to
think that this is a problem with Win2K and older laptops. Since this
seems to be a problem across different different brand of laptops, I am
also thinking it could be a flaw with the Phoenix Bios which a lot of these
older laptops use. What is also interesting, is that I have tested WinNT 4.0
on this laptop and have not had any restart problems. I have also tested
Linux and FreeBSD and have restart problems. But any Win9x based OS has no
restart problems. All of these tests have been clean installs. Win2K even
hangs on the first restart off the install CD after it initially copies the
install files - wierd. I have the latest bios for this laptop. I have asked
Compaq and they have no idea. I like the stability of Win2K and would like
to figure out what is going on. I don't want to wear out my power on/off
button on the laptop when I have to reboot. =(

 

[Jim]

Well, it hangs right after the color screen that says
Windows on it with the scroll bar on the bottom. This is
after the memory boot and the black and white scroll bar
page. On a successful boot, the next thing that would
happen is you would get a screen with a blue background
and the network would begin to connect and it would prompt
for a Windows login id and password. Is that enough to
help figure out where I'm at? appreciate any insight you
have. Jim

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

If your system hung consistently at the same spot
then I would suspect a software problem. Since it
was able to get past this spot on occasions, I am
inclined to think it's a hardware problem, perhaps
a marginal memory stick: Each time a certain memory
location is accessed during the boot-up phase, it's
touch and go whether the data can be reliably written
and read.

If this was my machine then I would take it to a
dealer and ask him to do some tests with his own
memory sticks.