XP Home only boots from menu

  • Thread starter Thread starter Kasom
  • Start date Start date
K

Kasom

Hi. Can anyone help me with this; when I trun on my PC it starts to boot. At the point the loading windows screen begins to fade in, the PC hangs. The graphic is there faintly in background.

If I restart, it knows it failed to start and goes to the menu, from here I can choose Start windows normaly and everyhting is fine.

I am in the habbit now of pressing F5 or F8 and starting from either menu. I always load 'normally' and it's always fine.

Shutdown is ok, everyhting else seems fine. I have only the one O/S installed. When I get into windows, I get no errors.

I have auto update on so I have the latests version of everything.

I'm baffled. What is different about starting from the menu?

TIA for any help

K
 
Kasom said:
Hi. Can anyone help me with this; when I trun on my PC it starts to boot.
At the point the loading windows screen begins to fade in, the PC hangs.
The graphic is there faintly in background.

If I restart, it knows it failed to start and goes to the menu, from here
I can choose Start windows normaly and everyhting is fine.

I am in the habbit now of pressing F5 or F8 and starting from either menu.
I always load 'normally' and it's always fine.

Shutdown is ok, everyhting else seems fine. I have only the one O/S
installed. When I get into windows, I get no errors.

I have auto update on so I have the latests version of everything.

I'm baffled. What is different about starting from the menu?
Click to expand...

I'm not convinced this has anything to do with "the menu". It sounds like
your power supply is dying. There isn't enough "juice" to get the hard
drive up long enough to completely boot the operating system (Windows).
Then when you try again, the drive momentum is enough to finish the job.
When you have a failed start, Windows always offers the Safe Mode menu, so
that's why you get it.

Naturally, since I can't see your computer or do any troubleshooting on it,
I might be completely wrong. But I'd start by swapping out your power
supply for a known-working one because this is an easy and inexpensive
test. If it solves the problem, great. If not, then it's time to look for
other reasons. Look in the Event Viewer and see if there are any clues:
Start>Run>eventvwr.msc [enter]

But start with the power supply.

Malke
 
Interesting theory, but how could the HDD spin, work (enough to read the boot sector anyway) and only then fail? Also soft re-sets sometimes do the same.

I can't rule it out, since I haven't done the test, but there doesn't seem are no apparent power problems or load issues I can see.

I do have 4HDDs 1 DVD and 2x GPUs (plus an extencive fan collection) hooked up to the PSU. Maybe I'll try lightening the load and see what happens.

Thanks for you thoughts.
 
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