Help with computer problem - won't fully boot windows

I have a PC I built last year, i7 2600K, Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD3R-B3 board, massive CPU cooler, 16GB RAM, SSD as boot and another as cache, three hard drives, W7-64. Until last night it was perfect, rock solid. This morning it won't boot.

When I boot it shows the "Loading Windows" animation (which is animating slowly), but it's booting really slowly. After it shows the "loading" animation goes black then instead of showing the login screen goes black, shows the cursor, but nothing else. Safe mode does the same thing. When I hit del (every 2 seconds after boot) it only goes into the bios about 1/2 the time, the rest of the time it tries to boot windows.

I didn't have much time this morning so i'm just looking for ideas and things to try tonight:
- I'll try booting with a boot CD to Windows PE or using the ultimate boot disk to run another OS.
- I have a rescue image, I just have to check if I have a boot disk, otherwise I'll reinstall windows then recover from my latest image.

Any other ideas? What else can I try?

EDIT - resolved. See post on page 2.

One thing that can cause Windows to behave like this is if it's having trouble initializing a device. When I'm troubleshooting something like this, one of the steps I perform is to disconnect as much as possible from the machine - try to get down to nothing but the boot drive and video card, and see what happens then. If Windows boots normally that way, then selectively reconnect devices until you find the problem child.

Thanks, i'll give that a go this evening. All I can disconnect is three hard drives and an SSD, I don't really have anything else plugged in. The fan controller plugs into a USB port, and that's only a few weeks old, I guess I can do that too.

I'd be interested in hearing what happens when you try to boot to Linux from your CD drive.

cacawcacaw wrote in post #13931416
I'd be interested in hearing what happens when you try to boot to Linux from your CD drive.

Yip, that can be a fast and easy way to diagnose a hardware failure.

Tim, I've seen this happen before and each time it was hardware related.
Either the power supply, a bad ram stick or the boot drive.

Mine was behaving like that when my drive was going bad. I could boot up using a CD, but never from the drive. It started gradually and then kept getting worse. Finally, nothing could get it started from the drive and replacing it fixed the issue.

This has happened on my laptop the same way it occurred on my desktop.

Moppie wrote in post #13931782
Yip, that can be a fast and easy way to diagnose a hardware failure.

Tim, I've seen this happen before and each time it was hardware related.
Either the power supply, a bad ram stick or the boot drive.

RandyMN wrote in post #13931803
Mine was behaving like that when my drive was going bad. I could boot up using a CD, but never from the drive. It started gradually and then kept getting worse. Finally, nothing could get it started from the drive and replacing it fixed the issue.

This has happened on my laptop the same way it occurred on my desktop.

It's all less than six months old and has been working flawlessly, including burn in tests.

Hard drive would be the obvious first place to start, the windows install. If Linux works then i'll try to recover from a system image. If that doesn't work I guess I'll have to do component diagnostics. Memtest x86, hard drive (not sure how), and finally power supply. Motherboard is a candidate too.

Fingers crossed it's just a corrupt windows install, that's the easiest fix.

If its going to fail, it will be in the first 6 months, so it could be anything

Right in the middle of wedding season too. That's why I got the new machine last year!

I'll run linux, then I'll try to recover the PC from a restore point, then I'll try a fresh windows install.

Tim, did you keep your old rig?

I've kept my old Q6600 encase something like this happens.
It's slower, but still usable.

On tablet. No gave it away. Disconnecting things didn't help. Had trouble trying to boot from CD, it didn't want to. System restore has let me back in though, everything seems to be working, but no idea why. Only thing I've done recently is install wireless drivers for epson printer.

If a faulty hard disk has corrupted some of the dll's or registry entries then a system restore can get it working again.
But, you will find it stops again shortly.

One of my SSDs won't come back online... I think it may have failed.

It's being pretty bizzare. It gets into windows then works for a while then locks up, even the reset button doesn't work, but the fans keep spinning and display is still up. Sometimes the light on the power supply goes out. Sometimes trying to start it up it works, sometimes it starts and stops and starts and stops. Based on that I wondered if it was ps or motherboard.

I've taken my second SSD out and it seems more stable. I guess i'll leave it to do something while I head out for an hour and see what it's done when I'm back. If it's ok I suspect an SSD malfunction. Luckily it's just my cache, but has thunderbird and firefox profiles, but they're backed up.

Check for firmware updates for the SSD, my newest SSD caused random lockups. I would have to completely power down, then restart. Otherwise the drive would fail to initialize and cause the BIOS to hang, it was my boot drive so windows would not load. It was a fairly widespread issue across multiple manufacturers, fixed in 99% of cases with firmware.