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Now there's a 1-minute blank space in my boot process

F

Felecha

Golden Member
Custom-built at a local shop, ABIT KT7RAID, Athlon 900 TBird, 768 RAM, 2x Seagate 80GB hard drives. I installed RedHat 9 on one-half of my second hard drive about a month ago, so I get the blue GRUB screen now. The default is XP, which lives on HD 1.

I've had an ongoing problem with screen freezes for several months, about which I have posted at times. I have a new mobo on order, but something new and troubling happened last night.

One of the freezes came, and I wasn't taking notes since it happens so frequently, but I remember that I hit the reset button as I always do and chose to go to Linux that time since there was something I wanted to play around with, and when I hit the arrow key to select RedHat I changed my mind and I don't recall if I hit the reset or did a C-A-D, but when it rebooted I got the screen saying there was a problem and did I want to boot Windows normally or do the last good configuration. I chose normal, and was distressed to see that after the initial black XP logo screen, instead of the short blank space followed by Welcome, the screen stayed blank a LONG time. I finally gave up after what seemed to me to be too long, and I hit the reset again. This time I chose last good config, and again there was a long pause and as I sat waiting in fear it finally reached the welcome. And when it reached the desktop the screen resolution was the tiniest possible. I fixed that, and was glad to see it boot after all.

But since then there is always a very long blank wait for the Welcome screen. The screen is just blank, not black. A full minute by my watch. Never more than a couple of seconds before.

And I can't swear to it, but I notice that the very last thing before the GRUB screen, after "Verifying DMI Pool Data", comes "GRUB Loader Stage 2". Did it not used to say just GRUB Loader"? Did it always say Stage 2? I can't be sure.

Anyway, this feels like something that a new mobo is not going to solve.

Anyone ever seen this?
 
sounds like a ram or motherboard problem. usually random freezing is due to OCing, bad drivers, or ram. if you dont think its drivers and you didnt OC, i would test out the RAM. how long has it been since you last formatted?
 
The hard drives are both about 3 months old. Full format and install of XP at that point. on HD 1

I ran memtest a month or so ago, a long run of it with no problems.

Never have OC'ed
 
Well, now. That's very interesting. Restarts didn't do anything, but a cold reboot brought it back to normal. Not on purpose, I had a reason to Shut Down rather than Restart. When I booted from shutdown, it went back to its normal boot, and has stayed OK through restarts.

Any ideas on what did it?
 
It was probably looking for a driver that was not put where it belongs - and the full shutdown procedure did that fixed it. This is not unusual if you run a lot of auto stuff in background.
 
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