Startup problems

[bre 0]

I have an Athlon TB 1.333, Win 2000 Pro. I'm having hangups when starting. Sometimes it's okay, sometimes I have to reset or power down a couple of times before the thing boots fully.

 

When it does stop, it's at the white screen with the blue progress bar. The bar is about two-thirds of the way where it hangs, always at the same spot.

 

Anyway, is there some kind of diagnostic tool I can use to determeine exactly what is causing the problem? The bootlog doesn't show anything, becuase I only get a log when it boots fully. When it hangs, there's no info in the bootlog. I'm a novice with Win 2000, absolutely in the dark.

 

Thanks for any help.

[kgeissler 0]

Can't you turn on a logged boot like you can in Windows 9x?

[GTwannabe 0]

Try booting into safe mode and uninstalling the MS pre-SP3 hotfixes. Usually fixes it for me.

 

If that don't fix it, you'll probably need to do a clean install of windows. Trust me, it sucks, but you should only have to do that once

[Palos 0]

Might be due to USB or ACPI problems...

What other hardware do you have?

[bre 0]

Let's see. I have a CDROM and CDRW, a USB Canon scanner, Roadrunner external modem, 2 nic cards. I seem to remember something like FM803 or something like that coming up in an error a while back. Is that an audio driver?

 

I put this thing together from parts I had lying around or in other PCs. I bought the MB, CPU, mem, case and started from there.

 

Thanks for your help guys. I guess I'll just leave it on instead of shutting down every time I leave.

 

I thought there might be some kind of utility that would log what was happening when it boots other than the bootlog. I remember with Win98, I had something that would show times and you could see if something was taking a long time to load.

 

It's no biggie. I was just worried that one day it wouldn't boot at all. I'll probably get a new one in about 6 months, so I'll just cross my fingers until then.

[Klark 0]

Remove the drivers for your sound card, shutdown, and then pull out the sound card....then reboot without the sound card in the machine. Then see what happens...

 

I have seen many soundcards do the exact same thing you have described....including my own. If the soundcard is your problem, then I would recommend putting the card into a slot where you can manually assign its own IRQ. Then update its drivers and see what happens...

 

Good luck...

[GutsButNuts 0]

Hi

 

Three suggestions after trying all the above, based on problems I had:

 

1. Power Supply can't cope. Not all 300W are the same, I bought an Enermax which puts out 185W on the 5v/3.3v, my old one put out 150w.

Didn't make a damn bit of difference though, but I've got meself a nice PSU now.

 

2. Check all HDD connectors. I use a pair of long nose pliers to tighten them all. As you make/break connections they loosen, and one of my RAID drives was cutting out. Not nice.

 

3. My CPU is unlocked and overclocked to within a few MHz of it's life. It's a Duron 800 at 7.5 X 133. At anything but "Default" in the CPU multiplier in the BIOS, it hung randomly even when 8x was selected. The L1 bridge trick drops a few millivolts, so I had to increase the core voltage. If you can, put it up the barest minimum and see what happens.

 

GBN

 

Epox 8KTA3+, Duron 800 at 7.5x133

768 MB Crucial CAS 2 PC133

2x10GB Maxtor 7200rpm ATA 100s as RAID 0

15Gb Maxtor 7200 rpm ATA 66 as backup drive

16/10/40 CDRW

GF2 MX400

+usual bits

 

I can now CD copy on the fly whilst simultaneously defragging all drives and doing a full virus scan. And surf while all this is going on. That's multitasking.