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 ?

When working inside the machine, make sure all power is off.
Unplugging the power cord is one way to be absolutely sure.

If the video card is NVidia, they had problems with a range
of models with solder balls cracking. You might want to
Google the details of your video card, and see if it's an
affected one. This is back in the "Easy Bake oven repair days",
where people were using toaster ovens in an attempt to
re-solder the broken BGA collections.

If you thought it was the SSD, you could put back the
hard drive temporarily and see. There's no particularly
strong reason for the SSD to blow out a SATA port, and the
symptoms probably wouldn't be video related anyway. If
the SATA port was blown, booting would stop, there'd
be a BSOD, and so on.

For times like this, I keep a crappy PCI video card around.
Which has no practical purpose, except to function as
a frame buffer when the real video card is toast. Being PCI,
there is a wider range of machine I can operate with it.
Every computer in the house still has a PCI slot, so I can
debug with that thing. I have no "pure" PCIe machines here,
meaning my cheesy PCI video card still works in everything.
That covers a wider range than keeping a spare AGP
or a spare PCIe around.

Paul