Windows XP freezes at desktop after booting up

[Sal 9000]

There is a faluty card pluged into your motherboard that is halting final boot perhaps a modem or other card i had this problem with my other pc. Check it out XP does this after POST not a big deal if it boots up the Motherboard is ok it is a card pluged into it.

 

[simonsayers]

Couple of updates:

I've looked in my computers event logger and there are many hard drive bad blocks , I assume the hdd is on the way out?

Ive attempted a CHKDSK (scan and attempt recovery of bad sectors) but I think it freezes near the end, I was trying this last night and didnt have time to leave it on for a couple of hours , so im trying again, but when it stalls the HD activity light doesnt flash much, or makes much noise so im skeptical whether or not it just stops, which is kind of annoying...


I dont think its my ATI card or drivers, theyve been in for a couple of months now.

I will try a virus scan today also seeing as i have more time.

When i disabled my anti virus , I cant re-enable the services in msconfig, so im gonna reinstall that. But i think its a hdd problem.

 

[eyeCpc]

Bad sectors on a drive will do it. The one way to test that would be downloading the diagnostic tools direct from the drive manufacturer. Those can be run off of a floppy or burned to cd if an image is available.

 

[simonsayers]

I did a 6 hour plus chkdsk and I was hoping that would of done something but it didn't. Back to square one.

 

[Lexluethar]

Have you done a virus / spyware scan? Download Spybot and Avast, both have a feature that can scan your system before windows boots.

 

[simonsayers]

the pc is now very very slow, and can barely do anything. I cannot reenable my anti virus as a service in msconfig, nor uninstall as add/remove software freezes, everything takes 3x as long. its not a pretty sight, even booting up takes about 2-5 minutes.

running an anti virus will probably take a long time and yield no viruses and will be a waste of electricity, due to the power of the pc being very slow atm.

i feel im gonna have to call up my pc tech guy n get him out to help. blah

 

[KSoD]

Have you tried Safe Mode? That should allow you to retain speed without having the infections harm your system.

 

[eyeCpc]

What and type is the hard drive there? You ran the check disk utility but did you download a diagnostics tool from the manufacturer to see if the drive was failing? If that's the case everything will slow down to a crawl since the heads are likely toast.

 

[Toroid]

I'll throw in another possibility in addition to a bad HDD: bad RAM.

If you have multiple sticks of RAM, can you try booting up with individual sticks and see if the problem is replicated? This can be checked pretty quickly and easily. Maybe also try plugging the stick(s) into different slots.

If the HDD is very slow, there is a possibility that it's running in PIO mode rather than the much faster UDMA. Check under IDE controllers menu in Control Panel/system/hardware/device manager.

You can also run HDtune or HDtach, and if your speed is < 10MB/sec then the drive is probably in PIO mode.

 

[eyeCpc]

It's funny you should mention HDTune...



I run regular scans on the drives here looking any problems.