Boot problem

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.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

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

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

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.

Sounds like a video monitor, card, or driver problem. Have you tried
booting Windows into its safe mode?

BEFORE Windows loads, you get a POST screen. That is the BIOS/UEFI
reporting what hardware was found in the computer, like CPU, RAM, and
drives. Do you see the POST screen okay?

When at the POST screen, if you get can see it, no driver has yet been
loaded by the OS which also means that driver's config cannot change the
resolution of the monitor (which the monitor may not support so you get
out-of-frequency-range shearing). First see if the video card and
monitor work okay by presenting the POST screen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-on_self-test

The POST screen should appear when the *hardware* has booted and is
presented before the hardware goes about trying to find an OS to load.
Some pre-built PCs have their BIOS configured to advertise the computer
maker, like pushing a fullscreen logo of "Dell" or some such brand. If
that's the case, it overlays the POST screen which means you may not see
some or all of the POST screen. However, even seeing that adware banner
screen (atop of or instead of the POST screen) means the video card and
monitor are working.

A further malfunction after successful boot was "USB unavailable" which
prevented USB mouse for about 20 sec. but corrected itself.

Disconnect *all* USB devices, including mouse and keyboard if they use
USB. Boot to see if you get into Windows (no idea if you configured
Win7 to show a login screen or to automatically login). You won't be
able to use the mouse or keyboard but the idea is to make sure no USB
devices are causing the problem. If you can boot that way into Windows,
try again but with the mouse and keyboard connected - and ONLY those
devices (all other USB devices are unplugged for this test).

On 6/28/2018 3:29 PM, 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.)
. . .
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.

Thank you to three contributors, whose suggestions were printed out and
filed away because the boot problem vanished after (say) 5 days. (Life
is too short to fret about curiosities that disappear.)
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)