Curious recurrant intermittent boot problem

[mattdp]

Hi,

I've got something really odd that seems to happen to my PC from time to time.

Firstly, it's worth noting that Windows XP takes a wildly variable time to load. It can be seconds, it can take ten minutes. I've never been able to figure out what causes the delays - there seems to be no pattern at all to when they occur. It also has an annoyingly high rate of failed boots - the machine starts, reaches the "Windows XP" screen with the loading bar, grinds away for ages and then stops. It will then normally boot properly after a reset.

What happens is that once every few months the PC will boot, do a failed boot, and then continue to do so over and over again after a reset. The odd thing about it is that it'll boot quite happily into safe mode - but trying to close down and boot properly will just cause it to hang again.

On two occasions I've had to re-install windows to fix this. On another two occasions - even more oddly - booting the machine with the windows CD in the drive seemed to fix the problem without booting from the CD.

I'm aware of one hardware fault on this machine. It's got a Maxtor hard drive with a slightly loose cable which needs jigging from time to time. I can normally spot this because when the machine starts to boot it doesn't pick up a hard drive boot source, tries to boot from CD and hangs. Jigging the cable always fixes the problem and, obviously, the machine doesn't get anywhere near safe mode. So I doubt it's related, but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

Does anyone have any idea what's causing this? I can give a full machine spec on request.

Cheers,
Matt

 

[g-paw]

There are numerous possible causes, e.g., Windows corrupts over time because of all the stuff it accumulates, driver issues like conflicts possibly caused by old drivers not being fully deleted, program conflicts, .e.g., video editing programs are notorious for not playing nicely with each other and even deleting one before installing a new one can cause problems because of residual files after the uninstall, a failing or inadequate PSU, or a faulty or failing hard drive, which sounds like the most likely issue you have given what you've said about the Maxtor.d

 

[mattdp]

Thanks for the suggestions. But can anyone explain to me why, if it's the Maxtor, Windows will boot happily into Safe Mode when this happens? It needs all the HDD drivers to do that, right?