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XPS - boot up stalling
XPS 420 EB400 Core 2 Duo Processor 3GHz 6MB 1333MHz: Hrad Drive 750 GB Serial ATA non Raid. System bought in April 2008.Vista Home Premium
Symptom
Boot up will stall 40 seconds into process. Dell's name on display, then the two lines at top of screen and after microsoft corporation screen with the strobing bar the screen goes blank and then nothing further. The light showing HD activity goes dim and flashes intermittently . XPS mini view functions but only the solitaire game. Modem light - which was flashing red - goes out. If I close down and start again the process is successful on the 2nd or 3rd attempt.
Event viewer logged - a "critical" event with an event id 100 - Boot Performance Monitoring a few days ago. In general it says "Windows has started up: Boot Duration : 113280ms IsDegradation : true. This "critical" event id 100 appears regularly on the log going back to September 2008. There are also logs of another Boot Performance Monitoring Event 101 which is a "warning".Tried the link to online Microsoft Technet but no results.
Actions taken
Full scan by mcafee negative. Booted up in safe mode via F8 and ran scannow. That reported some files repaired but other not. Restarted only to get stuck as before. When it booted correctly, at the third attempt, then turned off the hibernate mode in powercfg as I thought the PC was going into that mode. Dell manual says that if you turn hibernate off then it should then show this option on closedown but its not there. After that about 8 successful boot ups but the fault has returned today.
No programs downloaded.
Baffled why this boots sometimes but not others... any ideas, suggestions...
Mary G
2 Intern
2 Intern
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20.1K Posts
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October 2nd, 2010 10:00
Run the Dell Diagnostics including the extended hard drive test--not the quick test. Press F12 at the very first screen immediately after booting to access the boot menu. That can take hours on a large hard drive, so be patient. If the drive passes, boot to your vista disk and use Startup Repair. FYI--Windows 7 runs great on a XPS 420. You should consider installing that.
jonkw2010
4 Posts
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October 5th, 2010 08:00
Thanks for advice. So far run the following HD checks - confidence, read, seek, smart and verify - and all passed. Smart long test to do.
jonkw2010
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October 11th, 2010 04:00
Smart long test carried - passed.
Booting in safe mode and using msconfig to disable half of the start up items then restart and then the other half and restart. Both times system failed to boot. Is it worth trying that test on the services as well?
Still baffled why the fault seems to occur on 1st and 2nd boots but not on 3rd...hardware or softare??
jonkw2010
4 Posts
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October 21st, 2010 10:00
Tried to see if a start up item was the cause so booted up with half selected and then the other half but failed both times.
Changed the boot up from the quick boot to normal and that seemed to cure it but it is back again....