LOOOOONNNNGGGG stalls at boot and file operations

[Felecha]

XP Pro on an Athlon 64 X2 3800+, ASRock 939 Dual SATA2, 2 Seagate 80gb, 1 gb RAM.

This morning I came into my office at home and found my computer off. Cold off. I never turn it off, but on occasion out here at the end of our rural road we have short power failures. Maybe the power went out while I was at work? I dunno. I have a UPS that shuts it down after about 10 minutes. I didn't think more of it, just booted, and ... it stalled for at least 5 minutes after the Windows splash screen, just a dark screen, no nothing on it, but not pure black. Then the Welcome screen where it took another 5 minutes or so on my personal settings. Then 30 minutes of just the desktop wallpaper before the buttons and Taskbar came up. I've been trying to figure it out all day, and have rebooted several times and the same each time.

I've wondered about this being April 1, and some kind of virus, but the first thing it did when the first boot completed was to do the weekly Norton system scan and the def's were as of March 30, and no viruses.

I finally decided it was time to give up and restore the whole drive from my weekly Ghost image. I have 2 hard drives, and every Saturday I image the C drive over to D. I also copy my entire My Documents over to a directory on D every day, and all my "precious data" is there. Also I regularly back up my Quicken to a flash memory stick every time I do anything there. So I'm confident the data is OK.

I was very interested, though, to note that when I went to do a backup of Quicken just to make sure, it stalled on the dialog asking "where do you want to backup". Since I knew I had backed it up last time, and I was just being anal, I went into Windows Explorer to look straight into the flash drive to see, and that stalled. Hmmmm

So I got out my Ghost 9, put the disk in the CD drive, and it booted to the CD, then it stalled after the initial progress bar, at "Please wait .... " Another 30 minutes.

When it finally came into Ghost windows to do the Restore, I navigated to the Wizard and when it came to Browse for the backup image to restore from, it gave me an ordinary File Open dialog, and started at My Documents. I clicked on the dropdown at the top, to go to the D drive, and it stalled. I occasionally see Windows stall for 30 seconds or so at that task, or stall at deleting a button off the Quick Launch, but this was 30 minutes before I gave up and started over. Second time, same stalls in the Ghost boot sequence, and I thought I would try to navigate to D for the backup image without using that dropdown. I went up from My Documents to Desktop with the up button, then double clicked on My Computer, and it's been 45 minutes there now, stalled.

If I can't get to my backup I don't know what else to do.

The question is - I figured there was something screwed in my Windows. What could be subject to stalling that would manifest in the boot world of Ghost? I thought that when you boot to Ghost, everything in there is from the Ghost CD. What could be on that to be subject to a stall.

The only thing lower is the BIOS, isn't it? What could be in there that would be involved here?

 

[Felecha]

Well, I just don't know. I gave up at an hour, and hit the Reset button. Booted into normal Windows just fine, no stalls.

???????

 

[Don66]

Strange... same thing happened to me also today.
Just rebooted and BAM! 10 minutes to desktop:Q
I reinstalled windows, but it was still doing the long boot thing.
After an error message came up (something about remote services)
It started to run normal again.

 

[domllama]

Same thing happened to me .. awkward... I did a system restore .. but my computer acted even funkier.. so I just installed a fresh copy of windows and everything is back to normal-- about a week ago I would get stalls on my gaming rig and it would stall like you said..it was actually a usb cord that was slowing my system down on boot...I don't know lol

 

[jmdeathsquad]

check the psu, I replaced some where I work with similar simptoms and they work ok now, though there was a known power outage...

 

[jmdeathsquad]

shoddy psu's really tend to crap out after a power outage....

 

[Felecha]

Well, very interesting. after the thing seemed to fix itself, several days of normal running, then I came home from work this evening and the same thing -- computer was off. No power failure, I checked the alarm clock, the stove clock, the microwave clock. And again, in Windows Explorer I can't get it to go to my pen drive, it just stalls.

The psu is relatively new, I bought a new one to go with my new motherboard 6 months ago. FSP AX450-PN, which was recommended here on the forum.

So I dunno - again the biggest curiosity is the stalling when I boot into the Ghost 9 environment. If it stalls there, again apparently at requests to find something in the file system, in the File Open dialog, it doesnt seem like a Windows problem. But then, it IS a Windows File Open. So does Ghost somehow pull in parts of Windows to do its thing?

 

[Cdeck]

ghost doesn't use any windows routines. it may have been a static buildup, a bad capacitor or a failing device. try unplugging the comp from the wall for an hour or two, reset the cmos and boot to safe mode the next time it happens. most likely, one or the other will fix it.

 

[Felecha]

Well, I didn't think Ghost would be faulty. I hate to think of a bad cap, that's the reason I did the new motherboard - the old one showed signs of instability that lots of folks here diagnosed as bad caps. This board is only 6 months old.

I'll try your tricks

 

[Felecha]

Hmmmm.. I dug out the mobo manual and found the section on clearing the CMOS. And I'm thinking - if that fixes it, something was screwing with the CMOS? If the error was at that level, it would feel at least a little reasonable that Ghost would be susceptible to it.

But any idea what CMOS setting could be involved in long stalls?

By the way, I just finished Ghosting back in an image from a day before the error first happened. When it booted up, same stall, so it plainly isn't something that just infected the previous Windows drive. So I guess I gotta wait out the 30-minute desktop and check a few things and then do the CMOS trick

Thanks

 

[Felecha]

But even if resetting CMOS does restore it, I bet there is something underlying that is bad. Since the problem did fix itself after the first day of trouble, then recurred, if the CMOS trick does it, it's still probably going to go bad again some day.

Yikes!!!

 

[Felecha]

Well, VERY interesting. Since the first inkling I had last weekend that something was wrong was when I went to backup my Quicken to my pen drive, and it stalled forever there, I checked after the reboot from Ghost finally completed, and sure enough the pen drive seemed to be just plain unavailable. Then I remembered that domllama said he had a problem with a USB device and I'm looking at my pen drive - USB device!. I pulled it and reinserted it and right away it was available to Windows Explorer and could accept the Quicken backup. And a reboot worked fine with no stall. So i certainly suspect either the pen drive itself or the USB port (or could it be the USB cable - I run a cable from around the back to up front where I have easier access to inserting and removing the pen drive).

Next time it starts stalling (and I sure expect it to happen some time, after these events) I'll see if pulling the pen drive solves it.

So ... if that's what it is, what is the problem? What could a USB device do to screw things up?

 

[Felecha]

Well, yes. I came home again to a dead box, pulled the pen drive and booted without a stall.

What could happen spontaneously with a SanDisk Cruizer 512mb memory stick in a USB cable to my USB port in the back? Maybe if it's the port, just switching the cable to another port? But what could happen at a port that would just kill the whole rig?