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Help troubleshooting a startup issue

Gillbot

Gillbot

Lifer
My new to me Dell M6600 has decided that after a week or so of sitting powered off, that it no longer wants to boot properly. If I power it on (cold boot) it hangs on a black screen with a mouse pointer but the desktop never appears. If you hard power it off during the black screen and power it back on it boots 100% fine. It also seems to warm boot ok and will reboot without issues.

I have it set to "No GUI Boot" and it isn't hanging on loading anything, it just doesn't want to load the desktop for some reason. I'm at a loss as to what can hang it while it is loading the desktop and i'm not savvy enough to know where to look in the logs to see if there is something preventing it from loading the desktop.
 
hang on mouse pointer is where im lost.

because it hangs on mouse pointer it means it passes posts.

if it passes post, it tells me you got past cpu video and ram.

Have you tried to swap out the drive and see if its a drive issue?
If not its gonna be a planner board issue, and well, that mans the laptop is close to dying.
 
aigomorla said:
hang on mouse pointer is where im lost.

because it hangs on mouse pointer it means it passes posts.

if it passes post, it tells me you got past cpu video and ram.

Have you tried to swap out the drive and see if its a drive issue?
If not its gonna be a planner board issue, and well, that mans the laptop is close to dying.
Click to expand...

The next step is swapping the SSD to see if that's it. Has me baffled too since it gets to the point where the desktop background SHOULD appear but it never does. Just remains black and the background nor start menu ever appear, just hangs there. Hard power off/on and it boots right back up 100% fine within seconds.
 
Ran 2 passes of windows memory test yielded no errors. I reinstalled the video card drivers to be sure, we'll see where it goes from here.
 
Still getting hung before it loads the desktop......

I don't think it's a drive issue but i'm gonna swap SSDs to be certain next.
 
Whats it do when you try to boot into Safe Mode? I had a similar problem years ago and it turned out to be a bad vga card.
 
I'd have to let it sit overnight and try to boot right into safe mode to see, I'll try that tomorrow.

I'm open to any suggestions on troubleshooting as I have no idea where to start. Usually it hangs somewhere loading a driver, i've never seen one hang before loading the desktop only to be completely fine on a hard reboot.
 
It was suggested on NBR that I warm the laptop up a bit before hitting power, some suspect it's an issue with the IPS screen and sure enough it worked!! I put it over the heater vent for a minute before hitting power and it fired right up no problem. Odd but i'll take it!! Now to find a more permanent fix.....
 
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