Windows Boot Problems

jonahall

jonahall

jonahall

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18 Oct 2002
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320
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Near Bedford
Hi all -

Not sure if this should be here or in a hardware section somewhere, but here goes...

I have just upgraded my PC by swapping the motherboard and PSU. It was an Athlon 2000 in a Soltek board, now it's a Pentium 3.0 in an Asus P4P800 board.

My problem is an odd one. The PC will often refuse to boot into Windows to start with - it gives some spurious (I think) message about missing a file on the boot disk. Rebooting, it will get a bit further, then fail. Rebooting again, it will get a bit further etc etc until eventually it will boot properly into Windows (XP). Once in there the PC will perform flawlessly, no problems at all.

Has anyone any ideas at all? The PC is pretty fully loaded with CD/DVD and scsi drives as well as my old IDE drives, but if it is a power supply problem I'm surprised it ever boots up!

Any help gratefully received!

Cheers - Jon
 
You could try removing the mother board battery for say 30min, or reset the jumpers to bios default. May help? Maybe a reinstall of windows would help.
Worth a try anyhow.
 
Thanks for the answers guys. I have been fiddling about with some of the options in the BIOS, so I'll se tonight if that makes any difference.

Failing that, I'll have a go (although I did install Windows afresh)

Cheers! - Jon
 
Well my BIOS changes made no difference at all unfortunately.

In what way would the C drive being faulty cause this odd error? I suppose what I don't understand is why it 'gets better' just by rebooting the PC a couple of times.

Could it in some way be heat related? Or does something have to charge up in some way?

I am very confused!

Thanks for the suggestions so far!
 
Its best just to do a fresh-install of windows, or better still just reformat the hard drive. I was having strange errors coming up and slow machine, but after I reformatted the hard drive and put everything back on again, it now runs flawlessly without any problems, and no more blue screens :D
 
Just to clarify, when you installed your upgrades, you performed a new, clean installation of windows, yes?
Or did you bung all the new bits in and let windows sort itself out??

The only time I've had boot failures like this is with overclocking. Is the system at default settings??
 
What I did was to simply take out the old mobo/processor and replace them with the new, reconnect everything and switch on. It then started this 'not booting but getting a bit further every time' lark. Eventually in this process, it allowed me to boot from the CD drive so I booted from the Windows CD and did a reinstall. Now this isn't (obviously) a clean install as it installed over the existing Windows. But it wouldn't boot into Windows at all without doing this. I may try a clean reinstall if all else fails. I need a bigger C drive anyway!

Now this all 'might' be redundant, and I might have been being a silly boy. I checked the BIOS last night and for some reason the mobo had decided that the boot device order should be 1. floppy 2. CD 3. C Drive

There is no floppy installed in the machine, so I am wondering if this might have caused the problem - if it couldn't even find it. I have swapped them all around so it boots from the hard drivre and I'll see what happens when I get home from work later. I'll keep you up to date - very grateful for all the suggestions - thanks very much!

Cheers all - Jon
 
Unlikely to be the floppy tbh. Possible though but I'd bet that it's more fundamental than that.
Clean re-install is the way to go here I'm afraid.
 
Just to tidy this thread up - and in case anyone else has the same sort of problem in future...

It was a memory problem. The manual for this mobo is fairly opaque about how to configure the memory, inferring that if you want to run it dual channel configuration, you need to put matched ram into slots 1/3 and/or 2/4, but that if they don't match it will run OK but (to quote the manual) 'DIMMs installed into ANY THREE sockets will run in single channel mode'.

I had a matched pair of DIMMs plus one other odd stick. I just popped them in any which way since as I had the odd stick it was never going to run dual channel anyway. Matched DIMMs in 1 and 2, the odd one in 3. I recently bought an additional 512 stick which I installed the other day. I swapped the matched sticks into slots 1 and 3, the other two (completely unmatched, one 256 and one 512) into 2 and 4. Now it works fine, booting up without any of the problems I mentioned in the original post.

Not sure why this has solved the problem really, but glad it has. Thanks to everyone who gave advice and ideas!

Cheers all -

Jon
 
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