Odd Boot Issue

[Samaena]

Not sure if I'm posting this in the right place but this is the only place I'd come to for help and advice.

My Hubby just upgraded the stuff in box for me and I have a really odd boot up problem, though it doesnt happen all the time. I'm baffled.

You'll want to know what's in the box so...

CPU - AMD Athlon 64 4000+
MOBO - Asus A8N-SLI Premium
Display - NVIDIA GeForce 6600 (256) PCI-E
RAM - Corsair 2048 (PC3200 DDR)
OS - Windoze Pro SP2
HDD - 160Gig Maxtor SATA

Did I forget anything?

Ok, the problem is, on a cold Boot...sometimes even on a restart. It posts nicely, the little voice tells me so.
Once it gets to the Windoze logo and the little lights that crawl across the bar as it loads...sometimes it freezes there. I have to hit the reset button and go through it all again, to receive the black screen that tells me that Windoze didnt start properly and gives me the standard options. When I tell it to start normally, everything is fine. It boots without hassle.

Sometimes it does it a few times, sometimes it doesnt give me grief at all.

Its not overclocked, everything is at stock...simply because we werent too sure what to mess with...and as they say. 'If it aint broke, dont fix it' though I do think something will need tweaking. I just dont want to blow anything up :D

You guys on these forums have helped us before, your help and advice was second to none. Couldn’t think of anyone else I’d rather ask for help.

Thanks in avance for any light you could shed on this.

[Sir Golitech]

My guess would be possible windows coruption.
When the PC was built, did your hubby do a fresh install of windows? Also what is the make/model of the power supply you are using?

[Snafu]

A couple things come to mind. The first is whether the bios was reset when the new hardware was added (check the manual on how to reset the bios but simply involves moving the jumper pin when the system is off and I like to pull the battery too - after a minute or so put the battery back in and move the jumper back - the manual will tell/show you what to do :thumb: )

I would also try to reinstall windows. It will detect that wondows is already installed and asked if you want to repair it. Try the repair and see if the problem returns. If it does then you might have to do a complete reinstall (back-up whatever data you need).

[Just Learnin']

Depending what was upgraded it could also be a driver conflict if previous drivers for video, sound etc. were not completely uninstalled before loading new ones.

Are there any devices in device manager with a yellow exclamation mark?

Also check for any errors in Control Panel, Administrative Tools, Event Viewer in the categories Application and System.

[SVTcobra04]

I have almost an identicle problem, it was doing it every time I restarted or turned the comp off-on after I wiped my drive of just my linux partition. Only way i could boot was with the windows cd in there. Then I wiped the entire drive and made 1 large partition and it worked fine for a few months. Now though it occurs sometimes, I hardly ever turn off or restart my computer lately though and it only adds another 15 sec. to startup time, so it doesnt bother me. I think though it may be something with my Maxtor 200 gig, maybe it's prone to currupting some sort of bootup files i dunno.

[Samaena]

Sir Golitech: It was a brand new hard drive we installed windows on. The power supply is a Hiper M 350, brand new to us.

I'm really hoping its not a corrupt install of Windows but the more I think about it, the more I think you're right. :(

Snafu: We did have to reset the CMOS when it was being built up, it didnt like the memory. Something we'd learned from past experience and something we always forgot to do Lol.

Just Learnin': The only conflict showing in Device Manager is the Raid controller.

We do get options to do something as the computer boots up after the post, but its not set up for raid as yet. We were wondering if we could actually turn that screen off?

Thanks for the ideas. :)