Hi 

A blinking cursor on top left corner for a while indicates the MBR is taking time to channel itself to boot, which points more towards hard drive. 

release flee power and try going into safemode. 

Run hardware diagnostics to ensure the h/w is fine, if tests comes up fine, then backup the data asap and either do factory reset or a fresh installation of windows. 

Regards

With all due respect I'm not sure I follow your response.

You say the blinking cursor "indicates the MBR is taking time to channel itself to boot" - what does this mean - surely either the disk is going to respond and either the Master Boot Record is good or it isn't? By the way what does "channel itself to boot" mean?

Secondly what does "release flee power mean" - I've never heard this term before.

I've run the machine hardware diagnostics and apart from the one occasion when I got the RTC message it says everything is fine - also I have run hardware diagnostics on the discs and they are fine as well, so no problem there.

A factory reset or a fresh install of Windows really isn't a serious option for what looks like a probable hardware or BIOS problem.

regards, Bernard

Hi,
Release flea power mean, shut down the system, disconnect the power cable from the tower, and hold down the power button for 10-20 seconds. Plug back the cable and try to boot again. This process releases the static charge from motherboard which rarely causing trouble in system boot.
Keeping in mind the system diagnostics passed and though takes time but after certain time boots into windows, suspecting windows might have  been corrupted.
Are there external storage devices connected??

Regards

Hi,

I've already tried that several times, so that doesn't seem to be the issue.  Windows 7 HP 64 bit works perfectly once the boot process completes and I can use the system normally for 3 or 4 days until I next need to reboot it. I don't really think it s a Windows issue because the delay occurs after the first stage of the boot - as I mentioned I get the initial bios messages up telling me its a Dell system and the bios is A07 and then showing the F2/F12 options but then is when it pauses. After 10 minutes or so I get the next set of bios related messages coming up which tell me about the hardware disk configuration, so at the stage when I get the pause Windows has not come onto the scene. I have tried with and without USB and esata drives connected and there isn't any difference. Its almost as if the bios is struggling with something once it starts but before it gets to the stage of putting out the disk related messages, but there are no clues as to what this might be.

regards, Bernard  

There are no soft fixes for physically bad  hard drives. Malware can get back on the drive in seconds not days if you do the same thing that got it there before.

Hi

Either the motherboard or hard drive are suspected here (noting 0233 RTC error as you mentioned in initial post). Is your machine under warranty??

Regards

Hi Dell-Hema

I've resisted replying for a few days because I was away and I wanted to make sure the solution wasn't just a freak. Also I will ignore Speedstep's response - I've found his gratuitous comments and use of an abnormally large font size, which makes his replies almost unreadable in Windows Live Mail, to be just plain unhelpful and unpleasant.

As I implied I believe I have resolved the problem. After a lot more searching round my system I came across a record in the Windows Event Log which mentioned a disk controller error for disk 7. Now I've seen no error messages relating to problems with disk drives or controllers while Windows was running, so I was a little intrigued by this.

It turned out that disk 7 referred to a 16 GB SD memory card that I was using as a ReadyBoost device. I have had this card inserted for quite a few years now and although I didn't believe it made any difference to the performance of the system (since confirmed by its removal) I've had no reason to believe it was causing any problems. The card was actually inserted into the CAB-200 component - this is a combined memory card reader and Bluetooth device which Dell marketed for a short while. It seems to have been dogged by problems and when my machine was new I had a lot of conversations with Dell over it and at one point they shipped me a replacement module which I've had stored away for years - the problems seemed to be relating to earthing and I ran with my own earth wire attached to this device which eliminated all the initial problems..

Anyway having worked out that this error was associated with this device (not the memory card) I powered down the system and inserted my spare CAB-200 device. Lo and behold the system booted up at normal speed with no pauses. It also ran at the same speed as before. Viewing the Windows Event Log I saw that there had been some errors reported relating to the 'disk controller' part of this device on and off (not that many) over a period of time, but some of them did coincide with times when I knew the system was booting. I've now had a week of successful running with the spare CAB-200 device and no memory card inserted with half a dozen re-boots and no recurrence of the problem, so I'm beginning to hope it may be resolved. I guess the same resolution could have been achieved by just unplugging the cable from the rear of the CAB-200 device for anyone who does not have a spare module hanging around.

Anyway it looks like the problem is resolved - at least I'm keeping my fingers crossed. Thanks for your interest.

Bernard