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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until
today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. |
#2
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
Just noticed the Windows personalization settings for Transparency and
color of the start Menu, Taskbar and Borders was changed. I remember now that those changes happened the first time too. DC |
#4
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
In message , Paul
writes: [] Alternately, you can use this. It shows an MS panel already in your OS. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/window...ility-monitor/ Paul Interesting; like many of the commenters on that page, I had no idea this existed. However, rather ironically: for me, the reliability monitor (sorry, Reliability Monitor - I forgot for a moment that This Is Microsoft We're Dealing With Here) doesn't work! I see ten grey pillars, with no curve or text or dates or - well anything, and the box at the bottom says There are no reports in this view. I presume I have some service turned off, or similar arcanery. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf To give you some indication, opinion polls suggest that people who passionately hate or love country [music] are utterly indifferent to Marmite. - Eddie Mair, Radio Times 11-17 February 2012 |
#5
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , Paul writes: [] Alternately, you can use this. It shows an MS panel already in your OS. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/window...ility-monitor/ Paul Interesting; like many of the commenters on that page, I had no idea this existed. However, rather ironically: for me, the reliability monitor (sorry, Reliability Monitor - I forgot for a moment that This Is Microsoft We're Dealing With Here) doesn't work! I see ten grey pillars, with no curve or text or dates or - well anything, and the box at the bottom says There are no reports in this view. I presume I have some service turned off, or similar arcanery. I think in fact, your Reliability Monitor has one entry in it, that says the Reliability Monitor is broke :-) But you can't see that, because the Reliability Monitor is broke. ******* There's a few breadcrumbs (tech terms) in here. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...c-14f9a45d0f2b The picture of a broken RAC. https://filestore.community.support....e-75f67aefa9e1 C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\RAC\PublishedData and C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\RAC\StateData "i have tried to enable data collection for reliability monitor , but perhaps when i Right-clicked RAC, click View, and click Show Hidden Tasks. ( RACAgent itask name was not visible, even after expanding the name column)." Perhaps it's using Scheduled Tasks for some reason. https://social.technet.microsoft.com...ollection.aspx It's hard to imagine any activity you're been doing on the computer, interfering with that stuff. so the keywords seem to be RACAgent and RACTask. And some folders that it keeps. It probably does that, so a user can erase Event Viewer, without damaging the RAC collection. Paul |
#6
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Reliability Monitor (was: Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!)
In message , Paul
writes: J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote: In message , Paul writes: [] Alternately, you can use this. It shows an MS panel already in your OS. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/window...ility-monitor/ Paul Interesting; like many of the commenters on that page, I had no idea this existed. However, rather ironically: for me, the reliability monitor (sorry, Reliability Monitor - I forgot for a moment that This Is Microsoft We're Dealing With Here) doesn't work! I see ten grey pillars, with no curve or text or dates or - well anything, and the box at the bottom says There are no reports in this view. I presume I have some service turned off, or similar arcanery. I think in fact, your Reliability Monitor has one entry in it, that says the Reliability Monitor is broke :-) (-: But you can't see that, because the Reliability Monitor is broke. (-: (-: ******* There's a few breadcrumbs (tech terms) in here. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...7-performance/ reliability-monitor-in-action-center-does-not-show/7ce9ad4d-1607-4f14-a3 6c-14f9a45d0f2b I tried method 3 in that - no effect. (Methods 1 and 2 are basically the old helpdesk make-the-caller-go-away one of "reboot your computer", or a variation thereon.) Like one of the follow-up posters there, the command RACAgent wasn't recognised in my administrator command prompt. (Not surprising - Everything can't find any filenames that include it.) The picture of a broken RAC. https://filestore.community.support....es/7107ecb1-44 a3-47e2-ba4e-75f67aefa9e1 Well, that shows a window just containing one long line of text. I do get the window with the ten pillars - just they aren't labelled with dates or times, there's no graph drawn across them, and no entries below. C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\RAC\PublishedData and C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\RAC\StateData "i have tried to enable data collection for reliability monitor , but perhaps when i Right-clicked RAC, click View, and click Show Hidden Tasks. ( RACAgent itask name was not visible, even after expanding the name column)." Perhaps it's using Scheduled Tasks for some reason. https://social.technet.microsoft.com...s/3047.how-to- enable-and-disable-reliability-monitor-data-collection.aspx The task that led me to was already enabled, though showed as Ready rather than Running. I did try changing it to Running, but no change. It's hard to imagine any activity you're been doing on the computer, interfering with that stuff. so the keywords seem to be RACAgent and RACTask. And some folders that it keeps. It probably does that, so a user can erase Event Viewer, without damaging the RAC collection. Paul RACAgent not on my system; RacTask exists (as a 4,502 byte file - with no extension - as the only file in C:\Windows\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\RAC). -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G()AL-IS-Ch++(p)Ar@T+H+Sh0!:`)DNAf And perhaps that's the scariest thing about the modern mob. In social media, we haven't created a monster. We are the monster. - Jonathan Holmes, RT 2015/3/28-4/3 |
#7
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
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#8
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
"philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply |
#9
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
dadiOH wrote:
"philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply The OP has already tested the RAM, which passed. And if it is a power supply issue, why does it have the earmarks of a "failed profile at startup" ? A power supply failure will cause random failures at different times of the day. Or perhaps consistently, when the system has "power peaks". I've seen power peaks at BIOS level (because the power management isn't very good there), and if the PSU is pooping out, it could die just as easily at BIOS level, before the desktop appears. If, during shutdown, the system is actually doing "unclean" shutdowns, that could be damaging some registry related stuff. If you had "Automatically Reboot" set, your system probably wouldn't shut down for you. It would reboot. If the Automatically Reboot on a failure wasn't set, the system could crash during shutdown, not write the registry properly, and just... stop. Sometimes you get log entries for things like that (Event Viewer), but not if it was a BSOD. It might crash before having time to make a log entry. Now, that's a lot of supposition on my part, but it's the most likely thing to be messing up the profile (without it being a disk issue, and the disk has been replaced). When it comes to "BSOD Spectrum", if you look at a large number of BSODS on your system, you'll notice a fingerprint. For example, say the NVidia driver is really crap, then there will be a ton of BSODS with "nvxx" in the name for you to look at. If, on the other hand, the power supply is bad, you'll be getting obscure errors nobody has ever heard of. Ones you might have trouble finding in the Aumha STOP list. At the moment, the OPs symptoms seem to be pretty focused, but we don't have an overview of Event Viewer to see anything else that might be interesting. Or a view of any minidumps. (Pictures for dramatic effect...) https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html Paul |
#10
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
On Wed, 28 Mar 2018 10:02:49 -0400, Paul
wrote: dadiOH wrote: "philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply The OP has already tested the RAM, which passed. And if it is a power supply issue, why does it have the earmarks of a "failed profile at startup" ? A power supply failure will cause random failures at different times of the day. Or perhaps consistently, when the system has "power peaks". I've seen power peaks at BIOS level (because the power management isn't very good there), and if the PSU is pooping out, it could die just as easily at BIOS level, before the desktop appears. If, during shutdown, the system is actually doing "unclean" shutdowns, that could be damaging some registry related stuff. If you had "Automatically Reboot" set, your system probably wouldn't shut down for you. It would reboot. If the Automatically Reboot on a failure wasn't set, the system could crash during shutdown, not write the registry properly, and just... stop. Sometimes you get log entries for things like that (Event Viewer), but not if it was a BSOD. It might crash before having time to make a log entry. Now, that's a lot of supposition on my part, but it's the most likely thing to be messing up the profile (without it being a disk issue, and the disk has been replaced). When it comes to "BSOD Spectrum", if you look at a large number of BSODS on your system, you'll notice a fingerprint. For example, say the NVidia driver is really crap, then there will be a ton of BSODS with "nvxx" in the name for you to look at. If, on the other hand, the power supply is bad, you'll be getting obscure errors nobody has ever heard of. Ones you might have trouble finding in the Aumha STOP list. At the moment, the OPs symptoms seem to be pretty focused, but we don't have an overview of Event Viewer to see anything else that might be interesting. Or a view of any minidumps. (Pictures for dramatic effect...) https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html Paul Thanks Paul, and to the others. I've started making notes of every weird thing that I notice. I printed out all of the replies and will try to absorb it. My progress is slow but I'll keep after it and report back. Also going to fire up another PC and update my must-have apps so I can have reliable net access. Thanks, DC Maybe I really do have Mad Cow... |
#11
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
On 3/28/2018 5:40 PM, wrote:
On Wed, 28 Mar 2018 10:02:49 -0400, Paul wrote: dadiOH wrote: "philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply The OP has already tested the RAM, which passed. And if it is a power supply issue, why does it have the earmarks of a "failed profile at startup" ? A power supply failure will cause random failures at different times of the day. Or perhaps consistently, when the system has "power peaks". I've seen power peaks at BIOS level (because the power management isn't very good there), and if the PSU is pooping out, it could die just as easily at BIOS level, before the desktop appears. If, during shutdown, the system is actually doing "unclean" shutdowns, that could be damaging some registry related stuff. If you had "Automatically Reboot" set, your system probably wouldn't shut down for you. It would reboot. If the Automatically Reboot on a failure wasn't set, the system could crash during shutdown, not write the registry properly, and just... stop. Sometimes you get log entries for things like that (Event Viewer), but not if it was a BSOD. It might crash before having time to make a log entry. Now, that's a lot of supposition on my part, but it's the most likely thing to be messing up the profile (without it being a disk issue, and the disk has been replaced). When it comes to "BSOD Spectrum", if you look at a large number of BSODS on your system, you'll notice a fingerprint. For example, say the NVidia driver is really crap, then there will be a ton of BSODS with "nvxx" in the name for you to look at. If, on the other hand, the power supply is bad, you'll be getting obscure errors nobody has ever heard of. Ones you might have trouble finding in the Aumha STOP list. At the moment, the OPs symptoms seem to be pretty focused, but we don't have an overview of Event Viewer to see anything else that might be interesting. Or a view of any minidumps. (Pictures for dramatic effect...) https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html Paul Thanks Paul, and to the others. I've started making notes of every weird thing that I notice. I printed out all of the replies and will try to absorb it. My progress is slow but I'll keep after it and report back. Also going to fire up another PC and update my must-have apps so I can have reliable net access. Thanks, DC Maybe I really do have Mad Cow... I just now remembered...I had a sporadic startup issue after updating some drivers (video?). Moron that I am, I didn't catch on right away that my speakers make a sound on startup (kind of a "thunk"), and startup didn't proceed until I heard the speakers. I rolled back the drivers--problem solved. |
#12
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
"Paul" wrote in message news dadiOH wrote: "philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply The OP has already tested the RAM, which passed. And if it is a power supply issue, why does it have the earmarks of a "failed profile at startup" ? A power supply failure will cause random failures at different times of the day. I only encounterd a bad power supply once. The primary symptom was randomly failing to boot. |
#13
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
On Wed, 28 Mar 2018 10:02:49 -0400, Paul
wrote: dadiOH wrote: "philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply The OP has already tested the RAM, which passed. And if it is a power supply issue, why does it have the earmarks of a "failed profile at startup" ? A power supply failure will cause random failures at different times of the day. Or perhaps consistently, when the system has "power peaks". I've seen power peaks at BIOS level (because the power management isn't very good there), and if the PSU is pooping out, it could die just as easily at BIOS level, before the desktop appears. If, during shutdown, the system is actually doing "unclean" shutdowns, that could be damaging some registry related stuff. If you had "Automatically Reboot" set, your system probably wouldn't shut down for you. It would reboot. If the Automatically Reboot on a failure wasn't set, the system could crash during shutdown, not write the registry properly, and just... stop. Sometimes you get log entries for things like that (Event Viewer), but not if it was a BSOD. It might crash before having time to make a log entry. Now, that's a lot of supposition on my part, but it's the most likely thing to be messing up the profile (without it being a disk issue, and the disk has been replaced). When it comes to "BSOD Spectrum", if you look at a large number of BSODS on your system, you'll notice a fingerprint. For example, say the NVidia driver is really crap, then there will be a ton of BSODS with "nvxx" in the name for you to look at. If, on the other hand, the power supply is bad, you'll be getting obscure errors nobody has ever heard of. Ones you might have trouble finding in the Aumha STOP list. At the moment, the OPs symptoms seem to be pretty focused, but we don't have an overview of Event Viewer to see anything else that might be interesting. Or a view of any minidumps. (Pictures for dramatic effect...) https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html Paul You made me think about a corrupted User Profile. I went he https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...d-user-profile Followed the steps and created a new user as administrator, like my original user account. I thought if a new account wasn't corrupted, it would start properly. Today I ran some tests and was disappointed. Didn't matter which user I tried logging on as. The symptoms of not getting beyond the "Welcome" screen and the disk activity light being mostly steady for a few minutes occurred. Sometimes it would finish starting and seem to work ok. But even then, a normal automated Log off, Shutdown and Restart, might or might not go smoothly. Tomorrow I'll read the pages you linked to see if I can understand/learn anything else to try. DC |
#14
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
On Thu, 29 Mar 2018 16:06:06 -0500, wrote:
On Wed, 28 Mar 2018 10:02:49 -0400, Paul wrote: dadiOH wrote: "philo" wrote in message news On 03/27/2018 03:43 PM, wrote: After replacing the HD one week ago, it worked fine every day, until today. Now some of the same symptoms are back: Everything appears normal up to the Login screen. I enter my password and "Welcome" appears but nothing more happens. Sometimes it will finish startup, but take much longer. No error messages appear except on a restart after a lockup, the basic Windows startup menu appears because of a failed proper shutdown. I'm really upset. After all I did, it appears I'm back to square one. I have no idea what to try now. Could be a RAM problem or possibly a bad mobo. Or power supply The OP has already tested the RAM, which passed. And if it is a power supply issue, why does it have the earmarks of a "failed profile at startup" ? A power supply failure will cause random failures at different times of the day. Or perhaps consistently, when the system has "power peaks". I've seen power peaks at BIOS level (because the power management isn't very good there), and if the PSU is pooping out, it could die just as easily at BIOS level, before the desktop appears. If, during shutdown, the system is actually doing "unclean" shutdowns, that could be damaging some registry related stuff. If you had "Automatically Reboot" set, your system probably wouldn't shut down for you. It would reboot. If the Automatically Reboot on a failure wasn't set, the system could crash during shutdown, not write the registry properly, and just... stop. Sometimes you get log entries for things like that (Event Viewer), but not if it was a BSOD. It might crash before having time to make a log entry. Now, that's a lot of supposition on my part, but it's the most likely thing to be messing up the profile (without it being a disk issue, and the disk has been replaced). When it comes to "BSOD Spectrum", if you look at a large number of BSODS on your system, you'll notice a fingerprint. For example, say the NVidia driver is really crap, then there will be a ton of BSODS with "nvxx" in the name for you to look at. If, on the other hand, the power supply is bad, you'll be getting obscure errors nobody has ever heard of. Ones you might have trouble finding in the Aumha STOP list. At the moment, the OPs symptoms seem to be pretty focused, but we don't have an overview of Event Viewer to see anything else that might be interesting. Or a view of any minidumps. (Pictures for dramatic effect...) https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/blue_screen_view.html Paul You made me think about a corrupted User Profile. I went he https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...d-user-profile Followed the steps and created a new user as administrator, like my original user account. I thought if a new account wasn't corrupted, it would start properly. Today I ran some tests and was disappointed. Didn't matter which user I tried logging on as. The symptoms of not getting beyond the "Welcome" screen and the disk activity light being mostly steady for a few minutes occurred. Sometimes it would finish starting and seem to work ok. But even then, a normal automated Log off, Shutdown and Restart, might or might not go smoothly. Tomorrow I'll read the pages you linked to see if I can understand/learn anything else to try. DC Still having the problem and it's still a crap shoot every time to see if it will complete successfully or if I have to shut off power and restart, The only suspicious Event that happens at every startup (if successful or not) is this one for ATC.SYS not loading. It's a file installed by BitDefender AV Free. Here's the full content of the Event Viewer Details: Begin============ Log Name: System Source: Service Control Manager Date: 4/2/2018 1:57:13 PM Event ID: 7026 Task Category: None Level: Error Keywords: Classic User: N/A Computer: AVA-386876-1 Description: The following boot-start or system-start driver(s) failed to load: atc Event Xml: Event xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/win/2004/08/events/event" System Provider Name="Service Control Manager" Guid="{555908d1-a6d7-4695-8e1e-26931d2012f4}" EventSourceName="Service Control Manager" / EventID Qualifiers="49152"7026/EventID Version0/Version Level2/Level Task0/Task Opcode0/Opcode Keywords0x8080000000000000/Keywords TimeCreated SystemTime="2018-04-02T18:57:13.063476500Z" / EventRecordID502112/EventRecordID Correlation / Execution ProcessID="876" ThreadID="880" / ChannelSystem/Channel ComputerAVA-386876-1/Computer Security / /System EventData Data Name="param1" atc/Data /EventData /Event End============== I found this: https://social.technet.microsoft.com...w7itprogeneral where someone was having a similar problem and Kate Li (MSFT CSG) suggested removing the file to see if that solved it. I was able to copy it to another drive for safe keeping, but I can't remove or rename it. I receive a msg saying I need permission from the administrators to do so. I am an administrator but that's not enough. At first the atc.sys properties said TrustedInstaller was in control and I couldn't find a way to edit/change that. But now after several attempts the TrustedInstaller entry is gone and it says SYSTEM is in control, but it still won't let me mess with it. I also tried to rename or delete it via Command Prompt (run as Administrator) and as another user I created earlier (also an administrator), but no go. Next to try will be to learn how to use process monitor to capture the statup process, but that will take a while. Note that when startup does complete successfully and the desktop appears, etc., everything seems to work fine for as long as I want to use it. But then a restart, with normal appearing logoff, shutdown and restart may or may not be a successful startup. DC |
#15
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Win 7 Startup Problems - Again!
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