windows - Vista slow boot, stalls at black screen with blinking cursor

06
2014-01
  • beporter

    I have a Dell Inspiron 537s slimline tower. I just reloaded Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit on it. All drivers are installed (no question marks in the Device Manager) and all currently-available Windows Updates (including SP2) have been installed.

    My issue is that although the system does boot into Windows, it "stalls" after the POST splash screen with the Dell logo and blue progress bar, but before the Windows Vista "logo" loading screen for about 2-5 minutes. The stall occurs before the point where the "F8" menu would normally appear, which makes it seem like a POST, MBR or boot loader issue, except if left alone, the machine always ends up (eventually) booting into Vista just fine!

    Other info: The computer was not exhibiting this behavior with the previous installation of Vista. There is nothing (that seems at all relevant) in the Event Logs. A chkdsk -f on the disk comes back 100% clean, as do all hardware diagnostics.

    This seems to be very early in the boot process and doesn't necessarily seem like a Windows problem, but as I said this issue didn't occur with a previous installation of the same version of Vista. There are lots of Google hits about Vista not booting at all, stuck at a black screen and blinking cursor, but I can't find anything about a system just taking a really long time to move on.

    Does anyone have any ideas?

    EDIT:

    Based on a suggestion below, I can confirm the stall occurs even with no flash drives connected, the front 5-in-1 media reader disconnected, the optical drive disconnected and no keyboard or mouse connected during boot. The BIOS is fully up to date (revision A03).

    • Answers
  • 8088

    I have seen this many times dating back to at least Vista and now Windows 7.

    If you get stuck, try unplugging all USB devices during boot up. This includes the keyboard, mouse, external hard drive, and wireless USB network cards.


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    Vista won't boot - just get black screen
  • DisgruntledGoat

    When I boot into Windows Vista (Ultimate), I just get a black screen (with the mouse visible and working). If I run in safe mode, it seems to pause for a while when loading crcdisk.sys.

    A lot of research says it could be a problem with the hard drive, but I dual boot Ubuntu and that works fine and I can still see and use the Windows partition absolutely fine from Ubuntu.

    I tried using the "startup repair" option on the Vista install disk but it didn't detect any problems. I have run chkdsk several times, with this:

    chkdsk C: /f /r

    And also drive D (the recycle bin). The first two times it detected and fixed errors on the C drive but now it doesn't detect any errors.

    Is there anything else that could be causing this problem?


    • Related Answers
  • user12889

    Since chkdsk found and "fixed" some errors the parition could be in a state which prevents it from booting in a way "start-up repair" does not recognize and thus fails to fix. You might want to try a re-format of the partition and re-install of Vista.

    The fact that there was a problem on the disk in the first place might also indicate a physical probem with the disk. Most vendors have special tools on their web-site to diagnose problems with their drives beyond what windows does. If you suspect the disk, buy a new one and migrate everything on that disk (even partitions which are still fine).

    There is also the possibility of a different hardware problem, e.g. motherboard, disk controller, but since Ubuntu seems to work fine this is less likely. You might still want to check your bios settings for anything unusual (which Linux might cope with but Windows does not).

    Btw, can you mount the partition from Ubuntu? If yes use this to make a backup of it first :-)

  • djangofan

    could be bad RAM. do a memory check using memtest86 . also, dont rule out video card RAM.

  • Area 51

    This usually happens when graphics card driver does not function properly. To get your computer working , log in safe mode and uninstall graphic card driver from device manager and reboot your computer. After you will able to login windows and Vista will automatically install the default driver for motherboard.