Boot-Hang-acitis.

[nev_payne]

Hey folks, only me, your incentric crazy Somerset guy.

Having a spot of bother with a Mitac M722 laptop. Its been ongoing for 3 weeks now, and as yet I haven't been able to isolate the problem...its been looked at every weekday that I'm in work. Heres the specs:

- Celeron 800
- 192MB PC133 So-Dimm
- 40GB Hard Drive
- Onboard ATi Mobility (16mb I think).
- Onboard 10/100 and Modem
- Intel AC97 sound
- 3Com Bluetooth PCMCIA (has been removed, but needs to be working).

The main problem I'm having is the Laptop halting on XP boot screen...it sits there throwing the blue dots from left to right for hours on end. I have managed twice to format the hard drive and get the OS successfully loading normally. I say twice becuase every other time the setup would hang usually around the Registering Components area....with again no let up on hang time.

The Laptop has recently had a BIOS flash done at Mitacs UK base of operations - that went sucessfully, and allowed the use of the 40GB hard drive (as it wouldn't support it before hand). Now one would think that as the BIOS became corrupt before hand, they would have had to remove the motherboard from the laptop and changed the BIOS chip over, and at the same time run some checks over the Motherboard and BIOS to make sure there was a clean bill of health. Since the problem has gone on I have launched numerous diagnostic programs including:

- SiSoft Sandra 2005
- CPUz
- Prime95
- AllInOne Boot Disk and launched 5 hours of Memtest86 and 16 hours of CPU burn In, along with hardware/motherboard diagnostic programs on the CD.
- Shutdown various pieces of hardware in safe mode to see if anyone of them is haulting XP - including the modem, easy access buttons, IR, Firewire, Sound and USB.

The origins of the fault are wierd at best - after the laptop came back following the BIOS flash, the Modem and Easy access buttons couldn't be installed by XP - through Safe Mode, these were installed, and Normal Mode could be loaded. The next time XP as successfully loaded, nothing was done in Safe Mode. Yet - after leaving it over last weekend, switched off and shut down, i came in yesturday to find after switching it on, XP wouldn't load properly once again.

I am stuck, my manager is stuck, and my Director is pacing the floor. HELP!!!

[nev_payne]

bumpness? I know this is near impossible, so I don't expect many replies...but can someone shoot a blank where I haven't looked?

[iranu]

I think your really pushing it to run xp on that machine. 256mb of ram is minimum I'd want for xp. perhaps running win2k would be better.

[icq3800846]

I guess you have tried the obvious? Opened the trap door underneath and taken the memory modules out, then put them back one at a time to make sure that they are seated properly and that it isn't one of them that is faulty?

192mb is a 128 and a 64 stick, try leaving one of them out and see if the problem still occurs, if it does, take it out and stick the other one in.

Have you tried blowing the dust out? A common problem with laptops is overheating processors, and the easiest way to clear some of the dust out is to blow some compressed air (in an aerosol from any camera shop) in the processor vents and watch the dust fly out.

Finally, does this still happen if you put a different hard drive in?

You really do have insufficient memory for XP, 256 is pretty much a minimum, and even with that your machine will be making heavy use of virtual memory, which involves an awful lot of hard drive accessing. If there is a dodgy sector on the hard drive where the virtual memory is, you'll get al sorts of problems.

[nev_payne]

Thanks for the points - the memory was an initial concern - probably the 3rd thing I did about 3 weeks ago heh. Have since removed and replaced a few times, and Memtest86 reported bugger all wrong with it.

Dust was removed where ever it lay - most of which was found ofcourse in the CPU heatpipe and fan block.

The hard drive as the most estute of us will have figured out is an upgrade I did in Week 1 (this is week 4 so people can keep track). The 20GB Hitachi was making sounds similar to my knee joint clicking out of place - thats pretty loud. We replaced it and through the BIOS flash, was supported in BIOS. The 40GB Momentus had the same problems as the 20GB - hanging during install at 2 particualar places - installing devices (half way), and registering components (half way again).

XP Home edition was infact shipped with this Laptop. I have since tried HomeSP1, Pro SP1+2 but haven't managed to obtain a copy of Corporate. The 2 times that XP did install properly, I went about tweaking the registery and memory managment to optimise performance regardless of the lack of ram.

Thanks again folks, if you can think of anything else just say

EDIT - something new has come up - would the master boot record hang XP loadup?