WinXP SP2 has problems rebooting correctly. Help?

[cpburns]

Hello all,
The system in question is about 4 years old running:
Athlon XP 2800+ (167.1x12.5 aka standard)
2x512MB DDR333 (2.5-3-3-7)
Radeon 9800 pro 128MB AIW
80GB ATA/100 on primary IDE channel (this is the boot drive)
80GB SATA/150 on a controller card
microATX nForce2 IGP with 8x AGP

(no overclocking was involved in the construction of this system)

The above listed system has been running fine for around a year now since i built myself the system in my sig. Just in the last two months, it has been problematic though. Occasionally on boot it will go through the BIOS screen, the hardware list screen, and even through the WinXP loading screen, but after it goes black while waiting to show the login screen, it hangs and refuses to go any further. Once it has performed one of these hangs, it will only repeat this on subsequent boots. Rebooting does not fix this. Often, "Boot with last known good configuration" will work, and the system gets back to the desktop on the subsequent loads just fine. After some time though it will return to this hanging behavior, at which time another "Boot with last..." will work again usually.

Here's the kicker: I REINSTALLED A FRESH COPY OF WINDOWS two weeks ago, and it's fully updated and clean. So please, no one tell me "wipe it and start over." I'd hoped such would work but it didn't. I did not wipe the SATA drive because that has all my fiance's data on it. A virus scanning program was installed before the drivers for the controller card were installed; therefore the system was protected before it was exposed to all that raw old data from before.

Another note: Previously, the system was generating error messages in the event viewer pointing toward the processor driver. After the reinstall of a fortnight ago it no longer produces these errors. In fact, there are no errors at all.

My next step is to run "chkdsk C: /r" but any thoughts regarding this behavior would be nice. My boot temperatures are around 40C (CPU) and 17C (NB), but I have nothing to monitor the temps while the machine is running. Motherboard Monitor 5 will not read this board's sensors. I do not suspect heat though because the machine does not tend to freeze up, especially not under load. When it has frozen, a hang of the sort I'm experiencing does NOT necessarily follow. In other words, the freezing does not seem related to the hangs. Thus I'd rule heat out, especially since the hangs seem to mess up Window's settings.

Any intelligent thoughts someone has, perhaps experience with something just like this, would be greatly appreciated. Thanks all!

 

[cpburns]

bump

 

[cpburns]

bump. any thoughts anywhere?

 

[g-paw]

If you did not format the drive before re-installing Windows and it doesn't sound like you did, that is likely your problem. You'll have to back up the data you want to save and there are any number of ways to do that depending on how much you have.

 

[cpburns]

We did indeed back up all data to the SATA drive off the controller card, and reformatted the main drive before reinstalling Windows. Any ideas? This problem has persisted through 2 reformats now.

 

[g-paw]

If it were me, I 'd do the following because it sounds like some software it getting corrupted since you said when you restore to the last good config it solves the problem for a while so I'd start with the software. First I'd uninstall all the drivers and download the newest version for each device and reinstall each including the printer. Unistallng the printer is sometimes tricky so I'd check on the mfg web site for how to get rid of eveything. Even if the most recent version on the web site is the same as you currently have, I'd downlaod and reinstall. It's always possible one of your drives is corrupted. Also I'd make sure all my programs were updated. If this didn't fix it, I'd try a new hard drive. If that didn't do it, I'd do a fresh install of Windows and load one program at a time and run it for a while and if no problems install the next program. Also I'd start Googling the problem as well as check out the Microsoft support site. The toughest part of this is figuring out how to phrase the problem in a way you'll get meaingful responses. Understand this is just what I would do, i.e., I can't give you technocally sound reasons for doing it. I'd also be drinking massive quantities of beer.