On Thu, 28 Jun 2018 15:58:01 -0400, Paul wrote:

Don P wrote:
Suggestions are requested for cause and cure of boot problems on an
IBM/Lenovo M52, running Win7 (updated) with a ViewSonic ViewSonic 2033
LED monitor, beginning about two weeks after replacing a (clicky) drive
C: with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD (with no problems at cloning and
installation.)

At cold boot, the system hangs at "Starting Windows" with rows of
coloured stripes across the screen. These are nonuniform, i.e. appear
in any of three or four different patterns (just once with also the
four-colour flag, but Win7 failed to start. Switching on and off again
may or may not start Windows normally. I usually get there after three
to five restarts.

I checked inside the case for dust bunnies and reseated all drive cable
connectors and four units of 1 Gb RAM -- no improvement.

A further malfunction after successful boot was "USB unavailable" which
prevented USB mouse for about 20 sec. but corrected itself. I cured
this by verifying printers and removing ghost instructions to print 3 or
4 pages. Another anomaly was that Network Detection switched itself off,
but I could turn that back on. (This PC is linked via wireless to
another desktop and a laptop on different floors of the house.)

This pattern of failure to boot is new in the last two days, two weeks
after installing the SSD drive C. I should be grateful if anyone knows
what causes this and how to prevent it.


Video card or RAM ?

I had a similar problem last year, coincidentally also on a Win 7
system, and it was bad RAM, in my case.

I had 4 sticks installed, and Memtest86+ (http://www.memtest.org/) found
it almost immediately. I originally tested with all 4 sticks in place,
then I tested them one by one until I found the bad one. Not usually
recommended, but I ran the system with 3 sticks for the better part of a
year until I got around to fixing it properly.

--

Char Jackson