Gather 'round, Geeks....

Welcome to RCTalk

Come join other RC enthusiasts! You'll be able to discuss, share and private message with other members of our community.

Register Log in
This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate
links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Rolex

Rolex

Hoof Hearted
In Memoriam
Supporter
Military Veteran
Build Thread Contributor
Messages
35,105
Reaction score
1,763
Location
In my recliner
RC Driving Style
  1. Bashing
  2. Flying
My computer would not restart out of sleep stage and took about 10 minutes to fully boot from a cold start. A few days ago Firefox wouldn't open at all, so I used Opera to get on this site.
Yesterday I'd had enough and backed everything up on DVDs and did a full system recovery to factory new. A 10 hour process over 2 days.

Basically the same thing other than Firefox now works.
When I'm told to reboot to complete the update install, it has to go into startup repair. Sometimes it will restart after that and sometimes it will recycle from the beginning. Sometimes I'm told Startup repair was unable to automatically repair the problem. Either way, when it gets to the desktop it acts as though it's the first start and looks for updates, then needs to be restarted to install them. No Firefox icon, and any icons I deleted reappear, and it's deja vu all over again.

Please, any info on this?
 
Did you format the HDD? The only way to truly clean it is a full disk format. If that doesn't help, you may have a hardware problem.

Run Memtest to test your memory. That's about the cheapest thing you could have to replace.
 
Yes, full format and wipe to factory new, re-installation of the OS from the partition.

EDIT:

Which link should I download? There's a hundred of them.
 
Last edited:
Then you have a hardware issue. I'm thinking memory, but possibly hard drive. Been a while since I've had to deal with an issue like this.

---------- Post added at 6:59 PM ---------- Previous post was at 6:56 PM ----------

Do you have more than one memory stick? If so, an easy test is to pull one, restart. If the problem persists, swap them. If not, you've found the problem.
 
I just checked some notes I made earlier and the message was "Boot critical file is corrupt".

Shouldn't that have been corrected in the new install?
 
Rolex said:
Yes, full format and wipe to factory knew, re-installation of the OS from the partition.

EDIT:

Which link should I download? There's a hundred of them.
Click to expand...

http://www.memtest.org/download/4.20/memtest86+-4.20.iso.zip

Extract and burn to a cd, set your pc to boot from cd.

---------- Post added at 7:03 PM ---------- Previous post was at 7:02 PM ----------
Rolex said:
I just checked some notes I made earlier and the message was "Boot critical file is corrupt".

Shouldn't that have been corrected in the new install?
Click to expand...


You're running off a partition?
 
I just checked and I'm still running 3G mem. 3070 MB to be exact.

You're running off a partition?
Click to expand...
I don't think so, but I believe the OS was installed from one on the backup drive.
 
Last edited:
Might be a bad sector on your hard drive, OR if you are running off of a partition, update your anti-virus definitions and scan the partition.
 
I'm about to scan the disk for problems. If a virus got past my security, I didn't think it could migrate to the new OS setup.

Thanks for your help so far. I'll update later.
 
I had a similar problem a while back and it turned out to be a bad hard drive. It seems that Seagate had a bad run of 1.5 TB hard drives and I some how got 3 of them. Replaced the drive and no issues since.
 
I had a new HP drive crap out on me for no reason with similar issues. First it would hang for no reason, then would throw errors on boot. When that happened, I shut it down, bought a new seagate 500G (4 years ago or so), cloned it and haven't had an issue since. I had the original running as a spare drive for about a week and ran a defrag on it after deleting everything and putting all my media on it... it flat out died half way through the defrag and locked up the PC again. Made a nasty clicking noise when I tried to reboot. Unplugged it and the PC booted right up without issue. That drive was only 3 months old.

I have since replaced the seagate EIDE with a SATA 500G seagate that I mirrored off the EIDE seagate to pick up a bit more IO speed. The old seagate is in a backup PC as a slave drive that I sync to once a month over my network... Fear... Is a powerful motivator!

I now have 2 drives in my main desktop, both SATA, the 500G with my OS/apps and a 1.5T seagate for my media. Drives sure are cheap these days...
 
Rolex said:
I'm about to scan the disk for problems. If a virus got past my security, I didn't think it could migrate to the new OS setup.

Thanks for your help so far. I'll update later.
Click to expand...

If the virus is a MBR(master boot record) virus, it can easily survive a reformat.

Only thing I know that can rid one of them is running "fdisk /mbr". That will overwrite the current MBR with a backup, that hopefully hasn't been infected.
 
Looks like a good one but I haven't kept up with the drives lately. Its been a while since I have built any thing.
 
I saw a few good deals on 2 TB drives then noticed they were only 5900 RPM.

Now, I ran mem tst from cd and it came up with no errors. When I ejected the disk and the reboot started, it booted correctly, installing the last updates. I've just finished installing some other driver updates and I have to reboot again. I hesitate....

------------------------------------------EDIT:

Success, and a rapid boot for the first time in months. I don't know if it will last, but well see.
Good for now, and I thank you VERY much for your help and your links alien. (Maybe it's a motor issue):D
 
Last edited:

Similar threads

Rolex
Gather 'round, Geeks...
Replies
18
Views
2K
Rolex
Rolex
WoodiE
  • Sticky
How to Solder Correctly
2
Replies
31
Views
36K
Roog
Roog
R
A Day in the Life ...
Replies
4
Views
1K
RobH
R
Back
Top