Weird XP StartUp Issues

Bry · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:27

Hi, i was wondering if anyone has come across this before and might be able to help because it is driving me insane.

My system:
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 4400+ 1MB (2.2)
GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS3
Asus A8N-SLi Premium nForce4 SLi (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB ST3250620AS SATA-II 16MB Cache
maxtor 500gb hdd

This problem has only started to occur a few days ago. basically windows starts to load with the blue bar going across the screen. This goes on for ages (approxamately 8 minutes) freezing at times as well. It will then blue screen and restart the PC. (unforunately it blue screens far too fast for me to read). After the PC restarts i then get the offer for windows safe mode or normal.
I choose normal mode and windows starts fine (in less than a minute) and everything appears fine.

The seagate drive is my master c drive and is split into 2 partitions. The maxtore drive is an IDE 500gb Single partition (used for storing files only).

Ive removed all unnecessary programs from startup, tried disk defragmenting but nothing appears to solve this issue. It happens every time, i can even turn the pc off while its loading windows to skip the 8 minute wait and it will then load fine (despite showing the safe mode prompt).

The thing is i did a ghost image a week ago and it was workign fine then im pretty sure. So i tried restoring this image, yet the problem is still occuring.

Does any1 know of any solution to this? Im thinking it might be a SATA issue but, the drive appears ti be healthy in SMART and the bios is set to boot from it as it normally does.

The only weird thing which i have found is boot.ini, ntldr and ntdetect.com is also on my 500gb ide drive as wella s my sata drive. Could this be the issue? as i thought these startup files only need to be on the system/boot drive which is my SATA drive and not my IDE Drive.

Im running windows XP SP2 with IE7 and all updates applied.

Im totally stuck on this issue and would appreciate any help.

Raumarik · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:34

right click on my computer
select properties
click the advanced tag
click settings (bottom right)
uncheck "automatically restart"

That might at least let you see the error message.

Also have you checked the event viewer? start>run> "eventvwr"

There might be something obvious cropping up in there.

meghatronic · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:48

If you can't get into windows, mash F8 then select disable automatic restart.

Note the blue screen error. Report back or google it.

Bry · 31 Oct 2006 at 10:58

Thanks guys, unfortuantely i had automatic restart disabeld so i couldnt do that. However, i did looka t the event viewer.
And i think i have found the cause but am unsure on how to think it.

Every time windows doesn't load i get 17 errors in the system error log which states:
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk3\D during a paging operation.

Futher information states:

Details
Product: Windows Operating System
Event ID: 51
Source: Disk
Version: 5.2
Symbolic Name: IO_WARNING_PAGING_FAILURE
Message: An error was detected on device %1 during a paging operation. Explanation An input/output (I/O) request to a memory-mapped file failed and the operation was retried.

User Action If these events are logged regularly on a primary system drive, replace the device. Otherwise, no user action is required.

Version: 5.0 Symbolic Name: IO_WARNING_PAGING_FAILURE Message: An error was detected on device %1 during a paging operation. Explanation An input/output (I/O) request to a memory-mapped file failed and the operation was retried.

This would seem to imply a problem with virtual memory?

Bry · 31 Oct 2006 at 11:22

Thinking it was the page file i moved the page file to the other drive. However, this has had no effect and i am back to square one.

Anyone else encountered this before?

Bry · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:02

Just done a full diagnostic of my HDD via seagate online. Found no problems. Off to do a memtest

Bry · 31 Oct 2006 at 13:58

system passes memtest fine.So it doesnt appear to be a hardware issue.

Anybody got any idea's please?

soleside · 31 Oct 2006 at 14:11

I'm having similar problems with my machine at the moment, like you, I've moved the page file, ran memtest, checked voltages and various hardware stress tests and everything appears to be fine. I don't know why but I am convinced it's the motherboard (A8N-SLI premium).

Edit: Also, when mine blue screens it doesn't have anything written on it, it is just a blue screen.

Bry · 31 Oct 2006 at 14:27

soleside,try this because ithink(touches wood) thati have fixed it.
Rulingout hardware i decided to check the drivers. The onlyones i thought that could be the cause would be nforce4 drivers.So i updated them and restarted.
Now the startup was even slower detecting hdd devices crawled but eventually it showed myother sata hdd as not there. Could this be the problem?

I turned off the pc and pushed all the sataand power cables firmly in, turned itonand the hdd was now found and windows (again touches wood) loads fine.

So it would seem my problems all occured due to a loose sata cable?

soleside · 31 Oct 2006 at 16:09

Thanks Bry, I'll give it a go later when I get back home. Thinking about it, I've already had to change the Sata cable a couple of times due to disk boot errors. Maybe the ones supplied with the mobo are flakey?