Hanging black screen on boot-up

[techywiz2007]

Ok, so I got a Dell GX280, I upgraded the drive and the ram, updated the bios, installed XP on it. I rebooted a few times and everything was working great, installed a few small apps, like yahoo, and a few other apps, restarted, still doing good. Then I ran microsoft update... ran the update. Now when I restart, on boot-up, I get about a 5 minute black screen, then the login screen, then when I try to log in, everything hangs for another 5 minutes or so...

Anybody got any suggestions that I could try to remove this delay?

[cluberti]

Try booting in safe mode, and if it works, then it's likely a driver (and from the symptoms, a network driver - could be the NIC driver, or a firewall or antivirus LSP driver).

[techywiz2007]

Thanks, I'll try that now.

~EDITS~

It hangs on safe mode too, right as the progress bar reaches the end...

Is there a way to view everything manually? (like on a mac, you can press a keystroke, and it displays all the processes that are running as it boots)

~EDITS~

I tried booting with the 'boot logging' enabled, and it booted lightning fast with no errors :/

~EDITS~

Cannot duplicate the 'lightning fastness' of teh first bootup with logging enabled.. I tried it again, and it was way slow again...

~EDITS~

I stuck the windows xp cd into the disk drive, and booted, but didnt hit the boot from cd key in time... so it booted into xp, at normal speeds O_O after about 5 reboots, it appears to have fixed itself...

Edited August 22, 2008 by techywiz2007

[cogumel0]

Go to event viewer and see if any errors appear there, most probably there will be some mention to that.

(start > run > eventvwr.msc)

[techywiz2007]

Go to event viewer and see if any errors appear there, most probably there will be some mention to that.

(start > run > eventvwr.msc)

Thanks, I'll check it tomorrow when I go in to work in the morning.

Is there something specific that I should be looking for?

[JedMeister]

The areas you will want to look are 'Application' and 'System'. You get to these by clicking them in the right-hand frame of the Event Viewer. I think its worth noting any 'Error' (red circle with white X) or 'Warning' (yellow triangle with black !) that correlates time wise. If you double click on the error, most of then will have a link to MS Help & Support Centre which will provide extra info. Anything you don't understand, post back and I'll sure someone will be able to help you out.

[techywiz2007]

The areas you will want to look are 'Application' and 'System'. You get to these by clicking them in the right-hand frame of the Event Viewer. I think its worth noting any 'Error' (red circle with white X) or 'Warning' (yellow triangle with black !) that correlates time wise. If you double click on the error, most of then will have a link to MS Help & Support Centre which will provide extra info. Anything you don't understand, post back and I'll sure someone will be able to help you out.

Thanks for your help.

[usasma]

Most of these sort of issues that I've seen at work revolve around corrupted video drivers or issues with the hard drive.

The video drivers seem to be ruled out by the hang in Safe Mode as well as normal mode.

I'd try chkdsk /r from the Run dialog, maybe (works occasionally) fixmbr and fixboot from the Recovery Console, and then a hard drive diagnostic from the manufacturer of your hard drive.