Windows 7 only displaying "starting windows" screen but system still working

[thedonutman]

I'm running W7 Enterprise and this morning my PC has started hanging at the "Starting Windows" screen right after the startup sound is played. I'm not really sure whats going on because safe mode works fine and using the "startup repair" utility in the recovery options reports no errors. I have system restore turned off as I (used to!!) make regular backups of my boot partition to an external drive but it seems to have made a recovery point at some point this morning when it wasn't booting properly - however, restoring to this point doesn't fix the problem (unsurprising as it was made at a time when it wasn't working anyway)

I've since found that I can actually get past the login screen and load programs even though it still only displays the "starting windows" screen. If I type in my password I can get onto my computer (obviously all I can see is the windows logo) but for example I can hear that skype has logged on etc.

Any suggestions guys?

Thanks!

[c12038]

Can you boot into safe mode "Press F8 when you switch PC on" if your unable to boot into safe mode your windows 7 installation is borked you need to do a repair see here http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/w...startup-repair follow instructions as per website....


Hope this helps

[thedonutman]

I've already done a repair and it didn't report any errors, probably because the system actually gets past the startup sequences and actually loads windows but just keeps displaying the starting windows logo.

[shaithis]

Check for a pending.xml file in your winsxs folder....if there is one there, delete it and try again.

[Phage]

Might be a bad hard drive. Try a complete re-install.
After that, test the HDD.

[Benjarmin]

Ive had problems where if i have an external HDD connected it hangs for a while. If you have any external HDD's plugged in try unplugging them before starting your machine.

[stilkun]

Looking through Windows event logs to see any issue that Windows have reported.

Could be something on the startup interfering the loading process. Boot to safe mode and run msconfig. Select Diagnostic startup which will load basic driver and services. If this starts up fine then indicates issue with a program or drivers starting up. To find out which one enable the one of services or startup then reboot each time until issues occurs again.

[MattHibbard]

Repair or fresh install